Chuck Palahniuk's startling and outrageous debut novel, basis of the hit movie starring Brad Pitt and Edward Norton. THE FIRST RULE about fight club is you don't talk about fight club. Every weekend, in the basements and parking lots of bars across the country, young men with whitecollar jobs and failed lives take off their shoes and shirts and fight each other barehanded just as long as they have to. Then they go back to those jobs with blackened eyes and loosened teeth and the sense that they can handle anything. Fight club is the invention of Tyler Durden, projectionist, waiter, and dark, anarchic genius, and it's only the beginning of his plans for violent revenge on an empty consumer-culture world. In the world of Fight Club, healthy young people go to meetings of cancer support groups because only there can they find human warmth and compassion. It's a world where young men gather in the basements of bars to fight strangers "just as long as they have to." And it's a world where "nobody cared if he lived or died, and the feeling was fucking mutual." Messianic nihilist Tyler Durden is the inventor of Fight Club. Soon thousands of young men across the country are reporting to their work cubes with flattened noses, blackened eyes, and shattered teeth, looking forward to their next bare-knuckle maiming. The oracular, increasingly mysterious Durden then begins to harness the despair, alienation, and violence he sees so clearly into complete anarchy. Every generation frightens and unnerves its parents, and Palahniuk's first novel is gen X's most articulate assault yet on baby-boomer sensibilities. This is a dark and disturbing book that dials directly into youthful angst and will likely horrify the parents of teens and twentysomethings. It's also a powerful, and possibly brilliant, first novel. Thomas Gaughan Brutal and relentless debut fiction takes anarcho-S&M chic to a whole new level--in a creepy, dystopic, confrontational novel that's also cynically smart and sharply written. Palahniuk's insomniac narrator, a drone who works as a product recall coordinator, spends his free time crashing support groups for the dying. But his after-hours life changes for the weirder when he hooks up with Tyler Durden, a waiter and projectionist with plans to screw up the world--he's a ``guerilla terrorist of the service industry.'' ``Project Mayhem'' seems taken from a page in The Anarchist Cookbook and starts small: Durden splices subliminal scenes of porno into family films and he spits into customers' soup. Things take off, though, when he begins the fight club--a gruesome late-night sport in which men beat each other up as partial initiation into Durden's bigger scheme...This brilliant bit of nihilism succeeds where so many self- described transgressive novels do not: It's dangerous because it's so compelling. (First serial to Story) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. "An astonishing debut . . . Fight Club is a dark, unsettling, and nerve-chafing satire." ― Seattle Times " Fight Club offers diabolically sharp and funny writing." ― Washington Post Book World "A powerful, dark, original novel . . . a memorable debut by an important new writer." ― Robert Stone Every weekend, in the basements and parking lots of bars across the country, young men with good white-collar jobs and absent fathers take off their shoes and shirts and fight each other barehanded just as long as they have to. Then they go back to those jobs with blackened eyes and loosened teeth and the sense that they can handle anything. Fight club is the invention of Tyler Durden, projectionist, waiter, and dark, anarchic genius, and it's only the beginning of his plans for revenge on a world where cancer support groups have the corner on human warmth. As the narrator of Fight Club puts it: "If people thought you were dying, they gave you their full attention". Where does Tyler Durden come from? Why do his violent schemes so capture the troubled, insomniac narrator? What events bring them to the roof of the world's tallest building, wired to explode in ten minutes? What will the end of the millennium feel like? Readers of Chuck Palahniuk's brilliantly apocalyptic and unnerving first novel are going to find out. Chuck Palahniuk is the best-selling author of more than eighteen fictional works, including Fight Club , Invisible Monsters , Survivor , Choke , Lullaby , Diary , Haunted , Rant , Pygmy , Tell-All , Damned , Doomed , Beautiful You and The Invention of Sound . He lives in the Pacific Northwest. SIGNED FIRST EDITION