STRANGER THAN FICTION

By Chuck Paluhniuk

233 pages

Published by Double Day

THE journalist is a writer in a hurry, always pounding on the keys to beat the deadline. The journalist writes objectively, detached from his or her piece, and restricted by the banal who-what-when-where formula.

The “writer writer,” as Chuck Palunhniuk calls it, is someone who writes leisurely and more creatively. The writer writer uses his own style as the formula.

The difference between the journalist writer and the writer writer reflects the difference between regular hardcore news that is purely informative, and an article that creates vivid imagery and literary pleasure offered by fiction.

Palunhniuk’s “Stranger Than Fiction” happily combines hard facts and pleasure reading.

“Stranger Than Fiction” is a collection of nonfiction materials that read like fiction. It contains 23 essays and journalistic pieces written in a delicious prose so delightful to read. His sentences have rhythm and crisp that uniquely characterizes his fictional works such as “Fight Club,” “Choke” and “Diary.”

“Stranger Than Fiction” is about real events and real people, whose characters Palunhnuik vividly portrays with full dimension and in a manner that will not leave you indifferent to the person being portrayed. 

His report about the demolition in a Washington town called Lind gives complete keen details about what members of the demolition team is wearing, how they came to town and what the place is like.

The segment about a college wrestling in Waterloo, Iowa reads exactly how he describes the piece: “What happens on this page isn’t wrestling, it’s writing,” he writes. “At best, this is a postcard from a hot, dry weekend in Waterloo, Iowa. Where meat fines from.”

Other essays include the wild sex festival in Missuola, Montana, the murder of Paluhniuk’s father and the trial of the killer, his encounters with clairvoyants, the side story of  “Fight Club” before it was made into a movie starring Edward Norton and Brad Pitt, and stories that he collected from therapy groups and hospitals.

The book’s conversational tone will make you want to keep on “listening” and get you interested in the otherwise mundane details of events that are otherwise tritely reported in the newspaper.

            Palunhnuik adds a new character to the American literary scene. 

SELLEVISION: A NOVEL

Publisher: Picador

Fiction

240 Pages

WHEN you’re browsing in a bookstore and stumble onto a book with an opening line that reads “You exposed your penis on national television, Max,” you immediately become a captive audience. Oh, well, at least I did.

            Augusten Burroughs’s “Sellevision” is not a porn book. When I read the intriguing opening line, I knew I got in on something twisted. It sparked curiosity as to why a guy named “Max” would expose his thing on national television.

            But Max Andrews, a gorgeous host for  “America’s premier retail broadcasting network” called “Sellevision,” says he didn’t really expose it. “It just sort of peeked out,” he says.

            And that’s how the story begins.

            “Sellevision” is a spoof of cable’s home-shopping mania, poking fun on semi-celebrities, who host television retail programs.

            The broadcasting network is composed of hosts, whose on-camera mishaps and scandalous affairs become staple for tabloids and TV talk-shows.

            Max Andrews has been fired for accidentally exposing himself during a children’s special, in which the hosts are required to wear bathrobes. After losing his TV job, Max spends the rest of his time auditioning for other TV and radio jobs if not loitering around the bookshop, where he thinks he could catch a smart guy to date.  But he finds no luck with either job-seeking and boyfriend-hunting missions. He ends up becoming a porn star, thus baring himself with a vengeance.

Another host, the prim and perky Peggy Jean Smythe, gets creepy e-mails from a mysterious fan Zoe, who comments on Peggy’s hairy earlobes, gruff voice, growing mustache, clumpy mascara. The spiteful letters from the e-mail stalker sends Peggy over the edge into Valium addiction and heavy drinking, and eventually to the mental institution. Peggy eventually loses her hosting job and becomes a born-again fanatic and author of a book that talks about how “Peggy Jean and Jesus” will save the souls of the humanity.

There’s also Trish Mission, the newcomer who tries to flirt her way to move her career upward. Then there’s Leigh Bushmore, the executive producer Howard Toast’s naive mistress, who waits forever for him to divorce his wife. A book titled “Women Who Love Bastards” is her bible.

And there’s Adela, who gets herself engrossed with the American Indian culture, thinking all along that she has native American blood, only to get devastated later when her mother reveals that she totally has no American Indian connection.

            In his best-selling memoir “Running With Scissors,” Burroughs is hilarious and lunatic. In “Sellevision,” he is hysterical and sarcastic. And like “Running With Scissors,” “Sellevision” will give you a wild ride.