'Pygmy' tour dates for Canada are here.   Click each link below for the specific Calendar page, which includes more details on the event, such as websites, times, phone numbers and locations.  Also, read below for instructions for each event.

Toronto, ON - May 12th
Details here

Montreal, QC - May 13th
Details here

Burnaby, B.C. - May 21st
Details here

Same as with his US tour, pre-signed copies of PYGMY will be available at all events.  Chuck can only personalize for the first 150 people so there will be a wristband policy in effect at the events.  Contact the venues for specific signing and ticketing details.  And as his fans know, he will arrive at his events 1 ½ hours early to start signing for the 150 people with wristbands. read more »

Chuck has a personal request for you all today, about the upcoming 'Pygmy' tour.

Notice Regarding the 2009 Book Tour for Pygmy:

Wear a Costume, Get a Prize.  At this spring’s book events for Pygmy, I’ll be looking for people who attend wearing the native costumes of Model United Nation delegates.  Yeah, just like the scene in Chapter Thirteen of the new book.  If you have a kilt – wear it.  Or, wear a kimono, a toga, dashiki, lederhosen, sarong, sari, grass skirt, burka… you get the idea.  Don’t let good taste or political correctness limit you.  I’ll reward the first fifty costumed delegates with prizes.  I’m still grateful to everyone who attended the Rant book events dressed as brides; you helped to make those evenings so much more spectacular.  So, if you have Cossack costumes, French mime costumes, Basque shepherd gear, Mexican serapes, American cowboy stuff – wear it, and win.  Again, the first fifty at each event get the goodies.  Don’t let your dignity stop you from having a good time, and I won’t feel like such a freak, myself. 

                                 
    Thank You,
    Chuck Palahniuk read more »

Tour Dates Here!

Order "Pygmy" Today!

Hello all!  Doubleday needs our helps.  Using the site crowdSPRING, they have designed a slew of mock stickers for 'Operation Havoc', the fictitious terrorist group in Chuck Palahniuk's upcoming novel Pygmy.  Doubleday needs you all to vote on your favorite designs by viewing each and clicking the hearts for the ones you like best.  They'll then make stickers out of the one that gets the most votes and these will be handed out during Chuck's upcoming tour.

To see the designs, go to: http://tiny.cc/tElte

This has been up for a week or so now.  I Twittered it, but I think it could also use some front page love. read more »

Order "Pygmy" Today!

Today is the day you've been waiting for.  Tour dates for Chuck's upcoming book "Pygmy" are here.  Below are the cities and dates.  Click each link below for specific details in our awesome new Calendar section.

Boston, MA - May 5th
Details here

NYC, NY - May 6th
Details here

Baltimore, MD - May 7th
Details here

Philadelphia, PA - May 8th
Details here

Washington, D.C. - May 9th
Details here

Also, here's an important note from his publishers:

“Here is the tour for PYGMY, Chuck’s new novel out on May 5.  Like last year’s Snuff tour, pre-signed copies of PYGMY and Chuck’s backlist will be available at all events.  Just a reminder: Chuck will personalize for the first 150 people in line only – contact the venues below for specific signing/ticketing details – and he will arrive 1 ½ hours early to begin pre-signing for those 150.  In Baltimore there will not be a signing portion to the event.”

The Strand event will be ticketed -- $35 and that includes a signed PYGMY and 2 drinks – since it will be offsite at Webster Hall.  read more »

Another positive of 'Pygmy' just turned up.  This one from Booklist.  Props to Keir Graff for shooting this one our way.

"In a time of justifiable concern about terrorism, Palahniuk has written a hilarious novel about an unlikely terrorist cell: foreign-exchange students who arrive at a midwestern city, bent on unleashing 'Operation Havoc.'The story unfolds in a series of dispatches from an unnamed 13-year-old agent, dubbed 'Pygmy' by the locals. (That his reports are in broken English makes no sense, but the prose provides terrific opportunities for humor even if, at book length, it requires some effort.) Despite Pygmy’s command of the deadly arts, he is still a 13-year-old, prone to unwanted erections, and he is not the coolest kid in the cadre, either. The frisson around his internal, target-acquiring narrative, the locals’ unwitting perception of him, and his outsider’s view of the routine humiliations inflicted upon high-school youth is so spot-on it produces a sense of déjà vu: surely someone would have thought of this before. ('Dispatch Sixth,' treating Junior Swing Choir, is laugh-out-loud funny.) This isn’t for everyone: as ever, Palahniuk is interested in pushing the limits of what readers will tolerate in terms of clinically described sex and gore. However, in contrasting the mindless sloganeering of totalitarianism with the anything-goes nature of Americanism, his own message is anything but subversive. By now, the author’s fans know who they are. Those left cold by last year’s Snuff (2008) will welcome his return to the fine form of Fight Club (1996). Palahniuk leaps over the line of good taste—and lands squarely on his feet."
— Keir Graff, Booklist (starred review read more »

Order "Pygmy" Today!

Props to Rayo C. for spotting this first.  Let's hope we see more of these soon.

Pygmy Chuck Palahniuk. Doubleday, $24.95 (240p) ISBN 978-0-385-52634-0

Palahniuk’s 10th novel (after Snuff) is a potent if cartoonish cultural satire that succeeds despite its stridently confounding prose. A gang of adolescent terrorists trained by an unspecified totalitarian state (the boys and girls are guided by quotations attributed to Marx, Hitler, Augusto Pinochet, Idi Amin, etc.) infiltrate America as foreign exchange students. Their mission: to bring the nation to its knees through Operation Havoc, an act of mass destruction disguised as a science project. Narrated by skinny 13-year-old Pgymy, the propulsive plot deconstructs American fixtures, among them church (“religion propaganda distribution outlet”), spelling bees (“forced battle to list English alphabet letters”) and TV news reporters (“Horde scavenger feast at overflowing anus of world history”), before moving on to a Columbine-like shooting spree by a closeted kid who has fallen in love with the teenage terrorist who raped him in a shopping mall bathroom. Decoding Palahniuk’s characteristically scathing observations is a challenge, as Pygmy’s narrative voice is unbound by rules of grammar or structure (a typical sentence: “Host father mount altar so stance beside bin empty of water”), but perseverance is its own perverse reward in this singular, comic accomplishment. (May)

Order "Pygmy" Today!

Chuck Palahniuk's next book will be "Pygmy". It's not due in stores until May 5, 2009. But the official description just went up on Amazon last week.

"Begins here first account of operative me, agent number 67 on arrival midwestern American airport greater _____ area. Flight _____. Date _____. Priority mission top success to complete. Code name: Operation Havoc."

Thus speaks Pygmy, one of a handful of young adults from a totalitarian state sent to the United States, disguised as exchange students, to live with typical American families and blend in, all the while planning an unspecified act of massive terrorism. Palahniuk depicts Midwestern life through the eyes of this thoroughly indoctrinated little killer, who hates us with a passion, in this cunning double-edged satire of an American xenophobia that might, in fact, be completely justified. For Pygmy and his fellow operatives are cooking up something big, something truly awful, that will bring this big dumb country and its fat dumb inhabitants to their knees.

It's a comedy.

Pre-order "Pygmy" today! read more »

Chuck Palahniuk's next book will be "Pygmy". It's not due in stores until May 5, 2009. But you can pre-order it today on Amazon.

Pre-Order "Pygmy" On Amazon Today!

For those that don't know, here is summary of "Pygmy", right from Chuck:

I've just finished the first draft of a novel called "Pygmy," a dark comedy about terrorism and racism. The lead character is a 13-year-old foreign exchange student sent to live with a suburban, white, middle-class family. Oh, and they're Christians. The visit is for six months, and he's one of a dozen similar kids, all shipped to America to live with typical families.

The secret truth is that Pygmy is a terrorist, trained since infancy in martial arts, chemistry and radical hatred of the United States. He has six months to build a prize-winning project for the National Science Fair. If he succeeds, he and his project will go to Washington, D.C. for the finals competition -- where the project will explode, killing millions.

So far, Gerry Howard says it's the best book I've done. Fingers crossed for luck.

In emailing back and forth with Chuck earlier this week, I asked him what he's been up to.  I might have been feeling him out for what he's been working on a little.  But it wasn't my primary intention.  Still, little did I know he'd be willing to reveal this much, about his follow-up book to 'Snuff'. 

The book is called 'Pygmy', and it's already written!  Read on below for the plot: read more »