PALAHNIUK, Chuck. Make Something Up: Stories You Can't Unread. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 2015.

Octavo. Full deep brown leather. Spine with raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. x, 317 pp. Signed Collector's Edition. Signed by the author on the special limitation page. Includes signed Certificate of Authenticity, edition card, and bookplate adhered to front endpaper. Originally published New York: Doubleday, 2015.

Make Something Up is Chuck Palahniuk's first collection of short fiction, gathering twenty-one stories and one novella written across a decade and a half of his career, many of them previously published in Playboy, Esquire, and McSweeney's. As a body of work it illuminates aspects of his method and range that the novels, with their extended formal architectures, do not always make visible: the compression and velocity of individual scenes, the precision of the comic timing, and the particular way in which his prose moves between horror and farce with a fluency that can make both effects simultaneously present in a single sentence.

The collection opens with "Expedition," a prequel to Fight Club that shows Tyler Durden before the events of the novel — a story that will satisfy readers who have followed Palahniuk's mythological investment in that figure across Fight Club, Survivor, and the subsequent graphic novels. The remaining stories range from the classically macabre — a son hoping to tell one last inappropriate joke to his dying father; a massage therapist whose speciality is the dying — to the politically satirical and the outright absurd. 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 "Tunnel of Love," a massage therapist runs the curious practice of providing relief to dying clients. The collection was ranked eighth on the American Library Association's list of the most challenged books of 2016.

Palahniuk has said that short fiction allows him to take risks that a novel cannot sustain — to push a premise to its absolute limit without the obligation to maintain it across three hundred pages. The stories in Make Something Up are accordingly more extreme than anything in his novels, which is a sentence that requires some consideration to fully appreciate. The New York Times called him "a writer who doesn't write for tourists." Publishers Weekly described the collection as "essential for Palahniuk fans and likely to win him some new ones."

Near fine. Some minor spotting along gilt edges; otherwise fine throughout.

This book is currently not on display in store. If you would like more information or to arrange a viewing, please contact: [email protected]

Catalogue Number: HH000542