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Loading... Make Something Up: Stories You Can't Unread (original 2015; edition 2015)by Chuck Palahniuk (Author)
Work InformationMake Something Up: Stories You Can't Unread by Chuck Palahniuk (2015)
   To Read (307) No current Talk conversations about this book.  LaurenThemself | Feb 20, 2024 |    ) Andrew.Lafleche | Feb 6, 2024 |  ) MrMet | Apr 28, 2023 |  ) JosephVanBuren | May 17, 2022 | And despite the miraculous, well-documented healing powers of the Comedic Arts my old man dies taking a big bloody shit in his bed. This is a pretty standard Palahniuk line from one of the short stories in this tome, of which a lot are OK, one's great and a few are...not up to par with his usual writing, albeit in novel form. Then, at times, you're jolted by his genius: And you know the feeling: You want your best friends and your fiancée to mesh, but my friends grit their teeth and look at me with their eyebrows worried tight together in the middle, and they say, “Dude, did it ever cross your mind that maybe—just maybe—Britney is mentally retarded?” And I tell them to relax. She’s just an alcoholic. I’m pretty certain she’s a heroin junkie, too. That, and she’s a sexual compulsive, but it’s nothing so bad some talk therapy wouldn’t fix her. Look at me: I’m fat; nobody’s perfect. And maybe instead of a wedding reception we could get our two families together in a hotel conference room to surprise her with an intervention, and instead of a honeymoon we could get Britney committed to a ninety-day inpatient recovery program. We’ll work through this. But no way is she retarded. She just needs some rehab. Then again, at the worst, he feels like a pastiche of himself: He owned a cat he’d named Belinda Carlisle and let drink from the black bidets. It was a long-haired sable Burmese, like a bubble of black hair. Ted loved Belinda Carlisle, but he knew enough not to let her get too close. All in all, this is entertaining, yet not too fulfulling. I'll recommend "Choke" or "Rant" much rather than this. (  ) pivic | Mar 21, 2020 |
 **** Notes From The Transgressive Underground. If Fight Club is the only thing that pops into your head when you hear the name Chuck Palahniuk, then you have some reading to do. I can understand if that is the first thing that pops into your head, because that was a great work that had the luck to be in the right place at the write time, but Mr. Palahniuk has written a fistfull of novels since then, and some non-fiction, and now he has written Make Something Up: Stories You Can’t Unread, a collection of short fiction. Most collections have some hits, some misses and some filler, and this collection, made up of stories both published and unpublished, is about the same. Mr. Palahniuk’s unique style and voice, however, make them all unmistakably his. As usual, Mr. Palahniuk creates gritty, mundane characters that you invest in immediately. These are people whom we would overlook if we saw them on the street, or shy away from up close, but Mr. Palahniuk shows us their humanity up close, in all of its terrible reality. In Knock Knock we meet a man who for his entire life has been the butt of his “old man’s” jokes, and as a result doesn't understand when not to joke. Red Sultan’s Big Boy is an innocent horse with the reputation of a sinner. The Jew That Saved Christmas is a vision of everyone’s worst Secret Santa nightmare exchange. The novella Excursion is a precursor to Fight Club, and shows a side to Tyler Durden that is both incisive and new. One thing that ties these disparate tales together is Mr. Palahniuk’s ability to make the strange ordinary, and the ordinary more interesting than anything we see in our everyday lives. He could make every tedious moment of a grocery store clerk’s eight hour shift fascinating. Make Something Up contains over a decade’s worth of work, so the quality is sometimes uneven, but the one thing that is consistent is Mr. Palahniuk’s insistence on pushing his fiction to the edge. Are these stories funny, sarcastic and poignant? Yes. Are they graphic, disturbing and grotesque? Yes. Should you read them for yourself to find out which is which? Once again, yes. Just don’t be surprised to find that most are a bit of both. Review by: Jenn Rollison and Mark Palm Full Reviews Available at: http://www.thebookendfamily.weebly.co...
"Make Something Up is a compilation of 21 stories and one novella (some previously published, some not) that will disturb and delight. The absurdity of both life and death are on full display: In "Zombies," the best and brightest of a high school prep school become tragically addicted to the latest drug craze: electric shocks from cardiac defibrillators. In "Knock, Knock," a son hopes to tell one last off-color joke to a father in his final moments, while in "Tunnel of Love," a massage therapist runs the curious practice of providing 'relief' to dying clients. And in "Excursion," fans will be thrilled to find to see a side of Tyler Durden never seen before in a precursor story to Fight Club."-- No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.15)
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Wikipedia in English
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'Zombies' was okay, I guess? (