Thursday, May 6, 2010

Palahniuk Back With New Novel, Tell-All


Photo Source: amazon.co.uk

Critically acclaimed award-winning novelist of Fight Club and Choke, Chuck Palahniuk has released his latest novel, Tell-All on Doubleday on May 4, 2010.

A Random House review of Tell-All on The Cult, Palahniuk’s official website, describes the novel as a “Sunset Boulevard–inflected homage to Old Hollywood when Bette Davis and Joan Crawford ruled the roost; a veritable Tourette’s syndrome of rat-tat-tat name-dropping, from the A-list to the Z-list; and a merciless send-up of Lillian Hellman’s habit of butchering the truth” (Source: chuckpalahniuk.net).

Narrator Hazie Coogie, caretaker of Hollywood actress Katherine “Miss Kathie” Kenton, guides the mysterious tale turned murder plot when Miss Kathie’s latest suitor, Webster Carlton Westward III, is discovered to have written a celebrity tell-all memoir alluding to Miss Kathie’s death in a forthcoming Lillian Hellman musical (Source: chuckpalahniuk.net).

Tell-All thus pays homage to American playwright Lillian Hellman, who died in 1984. Following the discourse laid out in Hellman’s autobiography, The Unfinished Woman (1969), Palahniuk reproduces Hellman’s controversial starlet persona crafted during her forty-plus year career. After penning critical successes such as The Children’s Hour (1934) and The Little Foxes (1939), Hellman’s public image was tested in the 1950s when she was blacklisted by the Hollywood Movie Studios for her long-time affair with communist party member and detective-novelist Dashiell Hammet.

Palahniuk is also set to release a novel, Damned, in 2011, which he said in an interview with Doubleday is “about an eleven-year-old girl who finds herself in Hell and learns how to manipulate the corrupt system of demons and bodily fluids. Imagine if The Shawshank Redemption had a baby by The Lovely Bones and it was raised by Judy Blume, and you have my next new project” (Source: chuckpalahniuk.net). Watch for a North American tour by Palahniuk soon in support of Tell-All.

Published by campusintel.com

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