With more than 300,000 copies sold, Chuck Palahniuk's brilliant first novel and cult classic is being reissued with a new Introduction by the author.

An underground classic since its first publication in 1996, Fight Club is widely recognized as one of the most original and provocative novels of the last decade. Now the author adds his own voice to the critical debate he generated. In a new Introduction, he discusses the various interpretations in the popular media of Fight Club and the movie it inspired, as well as his personal reactions to the work's reception and the influence that the Fight Club phenomenon has already had on our culture.

Chuck Palahniuk's darkly funny first novel tells the story of a disenfranchised young man frustrated with his bureacratic job and superficial relationships and disillusioned with the consumer culture's prepackaged pleasures. Relief for him and his peers comes in the form of Tyler Durden, the intensely charismatic inventor of Fight Club. Waiters, clerks, and middlemen seek out the visceral satisfaction of secret after-hours boxing matches in the basements of bars, thinking they have found a way to live beyond their confining and stultifying lives. But in Tyler's world there are no rules, no limits, no brakes.

"Fight Club offers diabolically sharp and funny writing." The Washington Post Book World

"An astonishing debut....Fight Club is a dark, unsettling and nerve-chafing satire." The Seattle Times

"A powerful, dark, original novel...a memorable debut by an important new writer." Robert Stone

"Palahniuk displays a Swiftian gift for satire, as well as a knack for crafting mesmerizing sentences that loom with stark, prickly prose and repetitive rhythms." San Francisco Examiner

"[A]n apocalyptic, post-grunge taste from the West Coast...a bizarre, ugly, and determinedly cranked-up novel, a novel, you must dislike while reading, but there is something else in the pulse — the staccato, edges-exposed way it gets from line to line — that makes you wonder if the author might not know a few secrets. Palahniuk can write." Sven Birkerts, Esquire

"[A] creepy, dystopic, confrontational novel that's also cynically smart and sharply written....This brilliant bit of nihilism succeeds where so many self-described transgressive novels do not: It's dangerous because it's so compelling." Kirkus Reviews

"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." Booklist

"Palahniuk's language is urgent and tense, touched with psychopathic brilliance, his images dead-on accurate....[He] is an author who makes full use of the alchemical powers of fiction to synthesize a universe that mirrors our own fiction as a way of illuminating the world without obliterating its complexity." L.A. Weekly

"Palahniuk is a vivid writer. The fractured distance of his language evokes a landscape in which the connections have broken down." Charlotte Innes, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Maybe our generation has found its Don DeLillo." Bret Easton Ellis

"Even I can't write this well." Thom Jones

Palahniuk's darkly funny first novel — which inspired the movie starring Brad Pitt — is the story of a disenfranchised young man who meets a stranger who introduces him to the visceral satisfaction of secret, no-holds-barred basement boxing matches.

Chuck Palahniuk is the author of the bestselling novels Diary and Lullaby, as well as Survivor, Invisible Monsters, and Choke. He lives in Portland, Oregon.