You Do Not Talk About Fight Club: I Am Jack's Completely Unauthorized Essay Collection

by Read Mercer Schuchardt (Editor), Chuck Palahniuk (Foreword by)

Pervasive and multidisciplinary, this insightful exploration discusses how and why this seminal work developed, and continues to grow, such a cult following. When Fight Club punched its way onto the scene a decade ago, it provided an unprecedented glimpse into the American male’s psyche and rapidly turned into a euphemism for a variety of things that should be “just understood” and not otherwise acknowledged. Key to its success is the variety of lenses through which the story can be interpreted; is it a story of male anxiety in a metrosexual world, of ritual religion in a secular age, of escape from totalitarian capitalism, or the spiritual malaise induced by technologically-oriented society? Writers, conspiracy theorists, and philosophers are among those ready to talk about Fight Club’s ability to be all these and more.

Genres: Nonfiction, Film, Essays

224 pages, Paperback

First published August 11, 2008

About the author

Read Mercer Schuchardt (PhD, New York University) is associate professor of communication at Wheaton College. He earned his doctorate under the invitation of the late Neil Postman at NYU’s Media Ecology program. He is also a member of the Media Ecology Association and the International Jacques Ellul Society. Schuchardt is a contributor to several books on communication and media theory, is the editor of You Do Not Talk About Fight Club, and the co-founder and editorial chair of the online journal Second Nature. He and his wife, Rachel, have ten children.

Reviews

[Oriana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Super cool essay collection that makes me really want to reread Fight Club, and watch the movie again too. As with any collection, it's a bit uneven, but the good essays are freaking great. Probably the best is the one that postulates that Jack and Tyler Durden are the grown-up versions of Calvin and Hobbes. Oh hell yeah.

[R.]

So, what's next?

Birds Ate My Face: What We're Talking About When We Talk about Invisible Monsters ...?

[Hugues Dufour · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great collection of essays. I'd been waiting for a book like this for a long time. Fight Club deserves all the attention it gets; it's a multi-faceted, important book that defines Roland Barthes' idea of the death of the author. This book illustrates that. Get ready to have your mind blown a second time.

[Annie]

if you liked fight club you'll love this
its like expilations for the book
its really great

[Karley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read Fight Club... seriously. Do it now.

[S. Wilson · Rating 3 out of 5]

The most interesting thing about You Don't Talk About Fight Club is that the collection of essays within present critical analyses of not just the original work by Chuck Palahniuk, but also the film adaptation by David Fincher, offering an even wider variation of viewpoints on the book and film that have both earned their own unique place in the cultural residue of America's turn-of-the-century zeitgeist.

There are some very solid entries that compare Palahniuk's work to Tolkien, Barthes, and Oedipus on the literary end of the spectrum, and the film version gets its own comparisons to other late '90s films such as American Beauty and The Game. The more obvious social-economic, political, psychological, and cultural themes are examined, as are those dwelling on identity and sexuality, and while some of this might seem like well-worn terrain, a detailed discussion of Fight Club would be remiss in ignoring these topics. For more bizarre tangents, there are direct links made to Fight Club as a clear illustration of government mind control experiments, and (my personal favorite) as a direct sequel to the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes.

While length is not necessarily a requirement for quality writing, the collection is hurt somewhat by the inclusion of some single-page and single-paragraph pieces that would work much better as blog comments than anthology contributions. Outside of these brief intrusions, the weakest parts of this collection are a rather tenuous comparison of Fight Club to Pink Floyd's The Wall, and "former martial artist's" supposedly tongue-in-cheek examination of fighting physics and homo-eroticism that comes off more homophobic than humorous. But apart from these few glaring exceptions, this collection does offer plenty to talk about when you do not talk about fight club.

[Bria · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'll be honest with you: this book lies. It claims to be "completely unauthorized", and yet, Chuck Palahniuk does the introduction. Now, I don't know if he actually holds the rights to Fight Club, so maybe if it only said "unauthorized" I would let it slide, but "completely unauthorized" is clearly just not the case.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

well diverse opinions and thoughts on fight club.