Rating: 
Summary: Compelling, like an auto wreck...
Review: Fight club is certainly an intense work by an author who I hope to read more of in the future. With characters whom you neither cheer nor boo racing to a compelling ending, Palahniuk has fashioned an engaging first work. Some of the reviews of Fight Club being some "generation x" manifesto are overblown; hey, just enjoy it for what it is, a compelling read that does what it is supposed to do, entertain for a few hours.
Rating: 
Summary: MOST MOTIVATIONAL BOOK I'VE EVER READ
Review: AFTER READING THIS BOOK I CANCELLED MY CABLE, PACKED THE T.V. AWAY, AND CANCELLED MY PHONE, AND THAT WAS 13 MONTHS AGO. I'VE REREAD THE BOOK 4 TIMES SO FAR AND HAVE FOUND IT JUST AS ENJOYABLE AS THE FIRST TIME. IT PUSHED MY THOUGHTS TO THE LIMIT OF WHAT PEOPLE CAN ACCOMPLISH IF THEY REMOVE THEMSELVES FROM THE MUNDANE.
Rating:
Summary: A captivating first novel.
Review: This book was strange but stangely believable. A grim comment on today's bored society and it's willingness to push expierence to extremes. The plot twist completely caught me by surprise but gave the book the final direction it needed. Soon to be a movie from David Fincher. How will the screenplay handle the twist?
Rating:
Summary: Well Done
Review: It's great to see a new young author on the scene. Chuck P. definately has a strong style--- direct,fluid,full circle story-- that is a pleasure to read. Fight Club delves into its narrator's neurosis with a kind of high paced psycho/schizodrama that is both fantastic and funny. Some nods to Ellison (Invisible Man)maybe,but all in all an impressive and ballsy piece of work.
Rating:
Summary: Copland's Evil Twin
Review:
I've been enthusing about this book to anyone who'll listen since I read it in one unbroken rush. I've described the author as Douglas Coupland's Evil Twin: he gets the subtleties and ironies and sadnesses of this end of the century, but he's not prepared to be nice about it. It's visual, indeed it reminds me of the classier graphic novels, it's contemporary -- Millenium was stealing from Chuck pretty soon -- and it's just TWISTED. Nasty, nasty nasty -- and unmistakably literary: not many people can combine those two.
Rating:
Summary: Please Read this Book
Review: This is truly one of the most thought-provoking books I have read in years. I would recommend it highly to anyone who likes modern fiction. The prose is clean and exciting and the setting and plot are extraordinary. Although it is not the kind of book that might seem to appeal to women, I loved it
Rating: 
Summary: Fight Club is a striking first novel along Ballardian lines.
Review: Palahniuk's novel was a bit lost in the scramble of promoting and reviewing current "literary" fiction. Norton issued it as a mainstream novel, but may have made a mistake by not promoting the book's affinity with postmodern apocalyptic fiction by J. G. Ballard, who obviously influenced this author's work. He isn't an easy read; Palahniuk pushes his obsessions about as far as Poe did in his most outre work (e.g., "Berenice"), but is never less than riveting. I read much of the book in public in airports on a flight home at Christmas, and if I had started reading aloud I might have been arrested on the spot. Palahniuk gets down to the grungiest, most painfully disturbing level of life in his portrait of contemporary underground men (literally so, since the "fight clubs" are staged in basements). There's a trick ending in this book--but without it the book might have gone downhill, since the earlier parts are so over the top. Anyone taken by promising American writers like Rick Moody and Donald Antrim ought to look at this book. I recommend it, and predict a cult following for it
Rating:
Summary: loved it!
Review: All of the books by Palahniuk that i have read of been nothing but outstanding and this on is no different. if you're trying to decide on the book or the moive, i'd say start off with the book and then see the movie.
Rating:
Summary: The all singing, all dancing...
Review: Fight Club is Chuck Palahniuk's first novel, and I still think it is his best. It is difficult to discuss the book since the movie has become so famous. I saw the movie first and, although I thought it was flawed, it was still a remarkable piece of filmmaking - especially the first half. Everything that was great about the film came directly from the book.
I imagine a lot of people take Fight Club as their bible. I don't think that even Palahniuk feels that way. Tyler Durden doesn't really have a consistent philosophy to live one's life; if we needed to hunt elk through Rockefeller Center, that would be just as stifling as having to work in an office for a living.
What makes Fight Club a great novel is that it taps into something we have all felt. Modern society has made everything corporate. Authentic experience is getting harder and harder to come by. We lose our soul working jobs we hate to earn money to buy things that we don't need.
Rating:
Summary: This Novel Deserves Acclaim
Review:
Chuck Palahniuk's debut novel, Fight Club, has acquired a following, and rightfully so, become a cult classic. It's filled to the brim with brilliant wordplay, insightful narration, and satirical anti-mainstream consumerism concepts. The style of the novel is splendidly unconventional. Everything from haikus and homemade explosive recipes to anatomy perspectives are present in this no holds barred literary work of art. I'm a very happy camper if Chuck really is the future of in your face Gen-X fiction.
Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler's pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die. For a long time though, Tyler and I were best friends.
So begins our tale set atop the Parker-Morris Building with ten minutes before it's blown to hell. Palahniuk's trademark is opening all of his stories (Fight Club, Survivor, Invisible Monsters) near the end, where the carnage has already really gotten out of hand, where people are about to die. Our Narrator is screwed, and with three minutes remaining before he might die, he tells us how he got in this mess in the first place, he tells us "I remember everything."
Welcome to the world of our hero. He's an insomniac working for a corrupt car company, traveling to wherever his boss doesn't want to go for meetings.
Our paladin is a corporate lap dog, jaded, disillusioned with his life. He's depressed, suicidal, an IKEA addict. On flights, he contemplates his own death by plane crash. Everything has become a routine to him.
I set my watch two hours earlier or three hours later, Pacific, Mountain, Central, or Eastern time; lose an hour gain an hour.
This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time.
Our Narrator is in dire need of a way to change his life, something to make him feel alive again, and sadly, Angela Hayes is already taken.
So to cure his insomnia, our main man goes to different types of cancer, disease, and terminal illness support groups. And although he's in perfect health, he's been going to these meetings for two years and hasn't been caught doing so because "Anyone who might've noticed me in two years has either died or recovered and never came back." He tells us "...why I love support groups so much, if people thought you were dying, they gave you their full attention." It is at these meetings that our Narrator meets Marla Singer, another Faker, the Narrator's antagonist/love interest. The support group meetings though, they're nothing more than a quick fix.
Enter Tyler Durden. A night job worker who our protagonist meets on a nude beach: part-time movie projectionist, part-time banquet waiter. After our Narrator's home and all his possessions within are destroyed by a bomb, a phone call is made. A changing of the guard occurs.
The phone rang in Tyler's rented house on Paper Street.
Oh, Tyler, please deliver me.
And the phone rang...
Oh, Tyler, please rescue me.
And the phone rang...
Deliver me from Swedish furniture.
Deliver me from clever art.
And the phone rang and Tyler answered...
May I never be complete.
May I never be content.
May I never be perfect.
Deliver me, Tyler, from being perfect and complete.
Tyler and I agree to meet at a bar.
That night, Fight Club is created. It's an escape for those with boring, everyday jobs, a place where yuppies can take their aggressions out on each other by beating the living hell out of each other. It's a boys-only club with eight sacrosanct rules. Soon however, Tyler takes Fight Club up a notch with Project Mayhem, a fascist group rebels against society by way of antics that get more and more extreme, right up until the novel's anti-climactic conclusion. The novel's brooding Catcher in the Rye-type ending is much more thought provoking than the film's impressively cinematic pyrotechnics blowout.
Trust me when I tell you to read this enthralling masterwork. Chuck Palahniuk makes the apocalypse of Western Civilization sound so damn cool even I'm anticipating it. Make sure to pick up a copy of this great book. Another underground, lesser-known classic I want to recommend is The Losers Club by Richard Perez.
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