Fight Club

Barnes & Noble Discover Great New WritersDesigner soap made of human fat, an anarchist's cookbook of volatile recipes, and the end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it — Chuck Palahniuk's outrageous, darkly comic first novel is a brutal reminder that we each have a part to play in the apocalypse. Plagued with insomnia due to the cynical nature of his job (he investigates accidents for a carmaker in order to assess the cost-effectiveness of a recall), Fight Club's nameless narrator spends his evenings attending support groups for the terminally ill. Masquerading as a sufferer of various cancers, or as a victim of brain parasites, he discovers that losing all hope bestows a sense of freedom; Facing death, he feels more alive than ever before, and sleeps like a baby. Until Marla Singer — also a shamming support group groupie — ruins everything. Marla not only invades his therapy sessions, but gradually insinuates herself into his private life as well, taking up with his housemate, the mysterious Tyler Durden. Tyler, a self-styled "minimum wage despoiler," works a succession of night jobs, taking perverse glee in sabotaging and blackmailing his employers. When, on a whim, the narrator and Tyler take turns punching out their frustrations on each other at a local bar, Fight Club is born. "The first rule about fight club is that you don't talk about fight club." Soon the disaffected drones of industry are spending their off hours beating each other to bloody pulp. After a night in Fight Club, they go back to their jobs bruised and battered, but with the liberating sense that they can handle anything. But FightClubis only the first stage of Tyler's anarchic master plan; Soon random acts of unkindness proliferate as mayhem and organized chaos spread across the country, culminating in a schizophrenic showdown on top of the world's tallest building.