The cover for Chuck Palahniuk's next novel Damned has just surfaced on Amazon.com. 

The books release date was pushed back to October 18, 2011.  More here: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0385533020/officchuckpalaha/

Thoughts?

Registration Deadline Today!

Craig Clevenger returns for 200 Proof Storytelling - one of our most popular intensive writing classes to date. This class combines the best of his famed Hotseat and Shotgun sessions into a single four-week Master Class. If you missed the chance to study with Craig previously, or you'd like a pure grain refresher course, give yourself the Valentine's Day gift that will keep on giving.

Beyond that load of chocolate, the extra pounds, and the brief romantic buzz, you've got a chance to join us for something substantial and lasting: an early spring commitment that will forever strengthen your prose and refine your storytelling ability.

This class starts up on February 8th.  Seats for this will be limited so...

Enroll Today

Within this course you'll get: read more »

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.