Reading Chuck Palahniuk examines how the author pushes through a variety of boundaries to shape fiction and to question American identity in powerful and important ways. Palahniuk's innovative stylistic accomplishments and notoriously disturbing subject matters invite close analysis, and the new essays in this collection offer fascinating insights about Palahniuk's texts, contexts, contributions, and controversies. Addressing novels from Fight Club through Snuff, as well as his nonfiction, this volume will be valuable to anyone with a serious interest in contemporary literature.

List of Abbreviations Acknowledgments Cynthia Kuhn and Lance Rubin, Introduction Part I. Genres, Structures, and Modes 1. Sidney L. Sondergard, "Chuck Palahniuk and the Semiotics of Personal Doom: The Novelist as Escape Artist" 2. Andrew Ng, "Destruction and the Discourse of Deformity: Invisible Monsters and the Ethics of Atrocity" 3. Cynthia Kuhn, "I Am Marla's Monstrous Wound: Fight Club and The Gothic" 4.Christina Angel, "'This Theatre of Mass Destruction': Medieval Morality and Jacobean Convention in Palahniuk's Novels" 5. Andrew Slade, "On Mutilation: The Sublime Body of Chuck Palahniuk's Fiction" 6. Sherry R. Truffin, "'This is what passes for free will': Chuck Palahniuk's Postmodern Gothic" 7. Joshua Parker, "'Where you're supposed to be': Apostrophe and Apocalypse in Chuck Palahniuk" Part II. Politics, Cultures, and Philosophies 8. Jesse Kavadlo, "With Us or Against Us: Chuck Palahniuk's 9/11" 9. David Simmons and Nicola Allen, "Reading Chuck Palahniuk's Survivor and Haunted as a Critique of 'The Culture Industry'" 10. Lance Rubin, "The Politics of Boredom: Punk, the Situationist International and Chuck Palahniuk's Rant" 11. Alex E. Blazer, "The Phony 'Martyrdom of Saint Me': Choke, The Catcher in the Rye, and the Problem of Postmodern Narcissistic Nihilism" 12. Peter Mathews, "The Politics of Voice in Palahniuk's Lullaby" 13. G. Christopher Williams, "Nihilism and Buddhism in a Blender: The Religion of Chuck Palahniuk" 14. Devin Harner, "True Stories and Beaded Necklaces: Fandom and Chuck Palahniuk's Writing as Ritual" 15. Steffen Hantke, "Blood on the Bookstore Floor: Chuck Palahniuk and the Case of the Fainting Reader" Notes on Contributors Kenneth G. MacKendrick and Nicole Goulet, Selected Bibliography Index