Every weekend, in the basements and parking lots of bars across the country, young men with good white-collar jobs and absent fathers take off their shoes and shirts and fight each other barehanded just as long as they have to. Then they go back to those jobs with blackened eyes and loosened teeth and the sense that they can handle anything.

Fight club is the invention of Tyler Durden, projectionist, waiter, and dark, anarchic genius, and it's only the beginning of his plans for revenge on a world where cancer support groups have the corner on human warmth. As the narrator of Fight Club puts it: "If people thought you were dying, they gave you their full attention."

1. Where does Tyler Durden come from? Why do his violent schemes so capture the troubled, insomniac narrator? What events bring them to the roof of the world's tallest building, wired to explode in ten minutes? What will the end of the millennium feel like? Readers of Chuck Palahniuk's brilliantly apocalyptic and unnerving first novel are going to find out.