Check out this impressive fan-made video that comprises the entirety of Fight Club into 60 seconds. The video was made by Alison Parker, who has submitted it to a contest that challenges the entrants to take any popular movie and condense it all down into 60 seconds.  I personally love this stuff, and have seen cool videos like this on YouTube before, but I think Alison has outdone herself here.

Watch the video above or here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7EYdpgedxs

And if you dig it, you can Vote for it here: http://vancouver.virginradio.ca/VideoChannel/FakeFilmFestival/View.aspx?PostID=34390

You have until January 25th to get your vote in.

Congratulations to one of our own: Brandon Tietz! Brandon is a contributor to the site who has conducted author interviews and is also one of our Writers' Workshop moderators. He came to The Cult in the summer of 2009, and with Chuck's thirty-six essays and peer review from his fellow workshoppers, he has since made finalist three times for Chuck's anthology, signed with a literary agent, and found a publisher for his debut novel, Out of Touch.

Out of Touch was released on Friday! _____________________________________________________________

Out of Touch is officially available for purchase as of today, and the February selection for The Cult Book Club.

read more »

For nearly as many books as Chuck has written, journalist Rick Kleffel has conducted a thorough and enlightening audio interview with him for his site, The Agony Column Podcast.  While a little late this time around, Rick has just edited together his interview with Chuck that was recorded during last year's Tell-All tour.

Here's some words from Rick on the piece:

I spoke with Chuck in his hotel with a view of the San Francisco Bay behind him, as the tide went in under the Golden Gate Bridge. It was a pretty spectacular, but, in retrospect, having edited the damn interview — that too, turned out quite well. Chuck and I talked about the novel of course, and many of the themes it suggests; celebrity, and how we assemble our personalities out of bits kiped from our favorite performances, as it were, of those around us, or those we see.

Listen to the interview here!

Live To Write, Write To Live

Stephen Graham Jones is a man who is constantly writing. He has no choice. He glides through the murky depths of the literary ocean like a shark, because if he stops moving, he'll die. In fact, by the time you finish reading this he will probably have completed another novel, guzzling his favorite vanilla-infused cola, scarfing whatever the hell Sixlets are.

It stands to reason that a man who writes a lot of books has the opportunity to do a lot of interviews. Jones is certainly no stranger around these parts, having previously been interrogated by The Cult in 2007 (HERE). The resulting interview goes into great detail about his Native American background, his fledgling literary career, and his compulsive writing process. read more »

Come the end of a year (and the start of a new one) it seems almost impossible to avoid 'Top 10' fever.  This is a fever that spreads to movie and gossip sites and can include everything from 'The Top 10 Worst Movies of 2010' to 'The Best YouTube Parodies'.  Don't lie.  We all love these lists.  It's why websites keep doing them.  And it's why I finally broke down this year and decided it was high time we do one of these for The Cult.

Our list will be a Top 5.  And I'm going to break it up into two categories. read more »

You know the drill, folks.  Every month a new book is selected and a new moderator steps up to lead the discussion.  This month, we will be reading and discussing Invisible by Paul Auster.  This month's discussion is being led by Timberly AKA littlemisscrapey.

From the back cover:

Sinuously constructed in four interlocking parts, Paul Auster’s fifteenth novel opens in New York City in the spring of 1967, when twenty-year-old Adam Walker, an aspiring poet and student at Columbia University, meets the enigmatic Frenchman Rudolf Born and his silent and seductive girfriend, Margot. Before long, Walker finds himself caught in a perverse triangle that leads to a sudden, shocking act of violence that will alter the course of his life.

Three different narrators tell the story of Invisible, a novel that travels in time from 1967 to 2007 and moves from Morningside Heights to the Left Bank of Paris to a remote island in the Caribbean. It is a book of youthful rage, unbridled sexual hunger, and a relentless quest for justice. With uncompromising insight, Auster takes us into the shadowy borderland between truth and memory, between authorship and identity, to produce a work of unforgettable power that confirms his reputation as “one of America’s most spectacularly inventive writers.”

Check Out Our Book Club

Chuck's next novel, Damned, will be released by Random House on September 6, 2011!  The release date just popped up on Amazon last week.  There is no pre-order or cover art yet, but you can keep an eye on things at this link.  For those of you who don't know anything yet about this upcoming novel, here's a quick summary from Chuck that he gave during a recent interview with Suicide Girls:

So Damned is about an eleven-year old girl who wakes up basically and finds that she is in hell and that she's dead, and that she's going to be eleven-years old and dead in hell for the rest of eternity. So she has to, number one, make friends and figure out how hell works and make the best of it. But she's also got to figure out why she's in hell and how she died, and then ultimately whether or not she wants to petition to go to heaven, to try and uncover some mistake that might have been made. So it's about an eleven-year old, a very optimistic, cheerful, pushy little girl who finds herself in hell. read more »

This one is new for me.  Yet another trailer mash-up of movies.  This one between Toy Story and Fight Club.  Pretty good.

Props to Kasey Carpenter for letting us know about it.

I think I just accidentally read a YA novel and I'm a little pissed about it.

Granted, there were no inter-Universal Monster romances, but I should have seen the signs- the atypical mass market meets trade product dimensions, the MTV Books imprint, the cover blurb from Stephanie Kuehnert (although to be fair, I had no idea who she was until I looked it up)- so I've got no one to blame but myself.

I considered bailing, but fuck it- I'm gonna write a review anyway. The publicist was pushing for it, and I can't be held responsible if they misjudged their target audience. If Belushi actually is a YA novel in disguise, it's gonna have to grow up, and fast. And if it isn't...

John Belushi Is Dead is the story of Hilda and Benji, two angsty alterna-teens on a whirlwind summer tour of LA's hottest celebrity death spots. On one such excursion, the aforementioned duo meet an elderly recluse, name of Hank. Hank is a man with secrets, possibly of the terrible variety, and Hilda makes her first friend since bonding over a moribund cat with Benji. But before you can say Harold and Maude, the May-December friendship is threatened by a handsome young screenwriter who proceeds to ingratiate himself into their lives. This is all uncharted territory for Hilda, and as she attempts to make sense of the situation she begins to- wait for it- realize there's a whole lot more to life than just death. read more »

Buy John Belushi Is Dead From Amazon.com

All-New Class Launch at ChuckPalahniuk.net

A recent survey of previous cult master class students revealed key areas of craft our students would like to tackle in an upcoming intensive class. In particular, conflict and dramatic arc drew a lot of votes. Next to that, survey respondents chose poetic elements in prose--the music of everyday language--as a preferred area of focus. A fair number also requested a class that would focus on finishing or resurrecting a previously unfinished story and shaping it into a final product, ready for print.

Art of the Short Story is a newly developed intensive six-week class that takes on all of these challenges and more. Students will be asked to register early and to submit an unfinished story prior to the start date. As many as six of these unfinished stories will be minutely critiqued prior to our first day, and those critiques will serve as cornerstone content for the class. Every student in the class will be challenged to shape his or her point-of-registration submission into a finished story during the class. Every student will be challenged to develop a second story, as well, from first seeds of inspiration to finished product. read more »