Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories [Paperback]

Chuck Palahniuk (Author)

Book Description

Release date: May 10, 2005

Chuck Palahniuk’s world has always been, well, different from yours and mine. In his first collection of nonfiction, Chuck Palahniuk brings us into this world, and gives us a glimpse of what inspires his fiction.At the Rock Creek Lodge Testicle Festival in Missoula, Montana, average people perform public sex acts on an outdoor stage. In a mansion once occupied by The Rolling Stones, Marilyn Manson reads his own Tarot cards and talks sweetly to his beautiful actress girlfriend. Across the country, men build their own full-size castles and rocketships that will send them into space. Palahniuk himself experiments with steroids, works on an assembly line by day and as a hospice volunteer by night, and experiences the brutal murder of his father by a white supremacist. With this new direction, Chuck Palahniuk has proven he can do anything.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This collection from shock novelist Palahniuk (Choke; Lullaby) is an eye-opening look at the raw material that goes into Palahniuk's fiction, as well as proof that the novelist's art is derived from keen observation and recording of details. Often these are as grotesque as a closeup in a horror film (e.g., in talking to a group of wrestlers enduring Olympic tryouts, Palahniuk focuses on their injuries, both physical and emotional). Half the essays are magazine assignments and include insightful profiles of rock star Marilyn Manson, indie-movie queen Juliette Lewis and a high schooler who wants to explore space via a homemade rocket. Others offer the author's impressions of a demolition derby, the Rock Creek Lodge Testicle Festival and life aboard the USS Louisiana. Palahniuk often philosophizes, dwelling on the effects his fiction has had on "reality," especially the obsession his fans have had with his novel Fight Club. Palahniuk is fixated on the transformation of life's raw material into fiction and the writing process itself, which he sees as having the potential for self-fulfillment. (Incidentally, Brad Pitt, who played Fight Club's protagonist, emerges as Palahniuk's alter ego, and a number of the essays play on this theme, creating a patchwork memoir.) Palahniuk's fans will undoubtedly revel in the secrets the author reveals. Newcomers might initially feel queasy, but they're likely to warm up to his visceral prose and come to enjoy it.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

From Fight Club (1996) and the guys who fight for sport to Choke (2001) and a young man who might literally be the son of Jesus, Palahniuk's novels are consistently populated with extraordinary eccentrics. So it's no surprise that in this collection of previously published magazine pieces, he writes mostly of the bizarre. Palahniuk focuses on themes of solitude and community, on our need to feel simultaneously special and a part of something. He attends the Olympic wrestling trials, for instance, and examines why men endure cauliflower ear and debilitating injury to participate in a sport that no one watches or cares about. The personal essays (Palahniuk describes a romp through Seattle while wearing a dog costume, for instance) don't shine as much as the journalistic pieces, although fans will be interested to learn personal details about Chuck and his experiences with quasi celebrity. But the best narratives here-- particularly a lengthy one on Americans who build European-style castles--show Palahniuk's deep compassion for oddballs and misfits, a hard-boiled kindness for which his fans revere him. John Green
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Anchor; First Edition edition (May 10, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385722222
• ISBN-13: 978-0385722223
• Product Dimensions: 5.1 x 0.7 x 8.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (70 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #53,687 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Chuck Palahniuk's novels are the bestselling Fight Club, which was made into a film by director David Fincher, Diary, Lullaby, Survivor, Haunted, and Invisible Monsters. Portions of Choke have appeared in Playboy, and Palahniuk's nonfiction work has been published by Gear, Black Book, The Stranger, and the Los Angeles Times. He lives in the Pacific Northwest.

Amazon Author Rankbeta 

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#97 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Action & Adventure

#97 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Action & Adventure

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

65 of 69 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Interesting takes from an uncanny observer August 14, 2005

By Charles S. Houser VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

I was fascinated by the level of thinking that went into the movie FIGHT CLUB. It motivated me to read Palahniuk's novel which was the film's basis. The thinking, the cleverness, was there too. And though the novel was extreme, on the verge of being sci-fi or a futurist fable, there was something quite plausible about it as well. The emotional jadedness, the fear of emasculation, the fakery by which the nameless main character lived out his life all seemed quite authentic. I was genuinely intrigued by what Palahniuk had created and made a mental note to read more by this author.

STRANGER THAN FICTION is a collection of articles written by Palahniuk for a variety of magazines. If you're fascinated by the "fight club" phenomenon, you'll find some satisfying glimpses into that story's little sojourn into Hollywoodland and the popular consciousness scattered among these articles. But even more so, STRANGER THAN FICTION offers glimpses into the absurdities, shallowness, and violence that constitute the end-of-the-millennium, life-in-America backdrop for that novel: the world of amateur wrestling ("Where Meat Comes From"), conferences where writers have seven minutes to pitch their stories to agents, publishers, or movie producers ("You Are Here"), a demolition derby in Washington State for combine drivers ("Demolition"), people obsessed with building medieval castles in the late 20th century U.S.A. ("Confessions in Stone"), users of steroids ("Frontiers"), the homoerotic nature of life on a submarine ("The People Can"), and an amateur rocket-maker seeking to win a ten million dollar prize being offered to the first private group to put a rocket into the atmosphere ("Human Error"). My favorite pieces, however, were the longer ones gathered in the "Portraits" section: actress Juliette Lewis ("In Her Own Words"), gay editor and political observer Andrew Sullivan ("Why Isn't He Budging?"), shock-artist Marilyn Manson ("Reading Yourself"), and Michelle Keating, a handler of rescue dogs ("Bodhisattvas"). What you get from Palahniuk consistently is a vision of people coping--one way or another, but coping nonetheless. And in an end-of-the millennium sort of way, this is the closest any of us is likely to get to hope. As Palahniuk says of himself in "Almost California", a self-mocking description of his visit to 20th Century Fox when FIGHT CLUB was in development, "That's why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. And writing makes you look back. Because you can't control life, at least you can control your version."

21 of 24 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars B-Side Stories... June 17, 2004

By D. Bakken

Format:Hardcover

From the author whose novels have always focused on people out of the mainstream, "Stranger Than Fiction" is a collection of essays/stories/articles that focus on real-life weirdos and other non-conformists.

- Demolition Derby drivers that crash around in farm combines.
- Amateur wrestlers trying out for the Olympics
- Men who build castles
- Disaster rescue people and their dogs
- etc...

While most of the pieces are very good, there are a couple weak spots, most of which consist of the person just talking and very little writing by Chuck. I am a fan of his writing style and would have liked to see more of that instead of those couple interviews. My guess is that they were just thrown in to fill out the book.

I gave it 5 stars because of those 6-8 pieces that I really liked (worth the book price alone).

If you like this book, check out "Fugitives and Refugees", also by Chuck Palahniuk. It is a collection of pieces and lists about his hometown of Portland, Oregon.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Isolated greatness padded by short, unfocused stories June 20, 2004

By Samuel McKewon

Format:Hardcover

Though he refers to himself as an Amy Hempel knockoff, Chuck Palahniuk resides among the best phrase-turners in American pop fiction - if he does nothing else - teasing readers with jabs for rabbit punches and haymakers to come even when the narrative runs from the rails.

Palahniuk's distinct talent for clipped, blunt prose still punctuates "Stranger Than Fiction," an anthology of essays and rants collected from recent magazine assignments, but every other aspect of the book is uneven: It is shabbily assembled, and few pieces are in depth or well-considered enough to be stand-alone gems. A moneymaker for both author and publisher Doubleday but not much more, "Stranger Than Fiction" hardly lives up to its title: Steroids, Marilyn Manson and castles are interesting enough, but not in the realm of Palahniuk's novels. Revealing himself more than ever before, Palahniuk comes off as a guy's guy with a taste for adventure and socializing and multitasking, more content, at least in the non-fiction arena, to hit and run than turn a subject inside-out.

For each segment that creates a full-bodied portrait - Palahniuk's committed, admiring feature on amateur wrestlers - there is the rootless, immature opener, "Testy Festy," a piece on a Montana sex carnival so pornographic it'll run off more potential buyers than it will attract, or the Tim O'Brien wannabe, "The People Can," as Palahniuk catalogs the life of a submarine well enough to frustrate the reader for its brevity. Palahniuk has planned an "on writing" book soon enough; in that case, best to leave out a short paean to Hempel and her minimalist style ("Not Chasing Amy") and expand it to the treatise Palahniuk intends, as evidenced by his Internet workshop. Same for the tribute to Ira Levin's socialite novels, "Sliver," "The Stepford Wives" and "Rosemary's Baby."

The one story for which this book seems made is a portrait of Palahniuk's father, who as a boy watched his father kill his mother than himself, and then in 1999 was murdered at 59 by the ex-husband of his new girlfriend. Palahniuk refers to it in parts of a few separate essays but never makes it a story unto its own (the date of some of these essays become apparent, too, when Palahniuk refers to his father's death as in recent past in one work, and "a few years ago" in another). There is room for three or four "Fight Club" anecdotes, which again should have been poured into one rumination on the entire project. The haphazard morsel approach on serious subjects reads like random toss offs whether Palahniuk intended it or not, while featurettes on Juliette Lewis and Manson are entirely too long and boring - a postscript on the Lewis piece about Palahniuk being kidnapped in a limo is better than both the star-fawning works are combined.

"Stranger Than Fiction" only becomes a must-read for ten pages during "You Are Here," a classic Palahniuk rant on ever-increasing tendency of aspiring writers to think of their own lives in seven-minute screenplays, unable to create the fictional motifs and vehicles necessary for a readable book. Palahniuk makes a compelling, focused argument disciplined right down to the piece's hook line: "Your seven minutes are up."

Better fighting the abstract battle against intellectual apathy than celebrity journalism, Palahniuk hasn't exactly embarrassed himself here. But he shouldn't quit his day job either.