Reading Chuck Palahniuk examines how the author pushes through a variety of boundaries to shape fiction and to question American identity in powerful and important ways. Palahniuk's innovative stylistic accomplishments and notoriously disturbing subject matters invite close analysis, and the new essays in this collection offer fascinating insights about Palahniuk's texts, contexts, contributions, and controversies. Addressing novels from Fight Club through Snuff, as well as his nonfiction, this volume will be valuable to anyone with a serious interest in contemporary literature.

Reading Chuck Palahniuk examines how the author pushes through a variety of boundaries to shape fiction and to question American identity in powerful and important ways. Palahniuk's innovative stylistic accomplishments and notoriously disturbing subject matters invite close analysis, and the new essays in this collection offer fascinating insights about Palahniuk's texts, contexts, contributions, and controversies. Addressing novels from Fight Club through Snuff, as well as his nonfiction, this volume will be valuable to anyone with a serious interest in contemporary literature.

Fully updated, this matter-of-fact handbook includes the most recent discoveries about drug use, including new information on electronic smoking devices, abuse of prescription stimulants and the opioid crisis. "Lively, highly informative, unbiased, [and] thorough" (Addiction Research & Theory), Buzzed surveys drugs from caffeine to heroin to reveal how these drugs affect the body, the different "highs" they produce and the circumstances in which they can be deadly. Neither a "Just Say No" treatise nor a "How to" manual, Buzzed is based on the conviction that people make better decisions with accurate information at hand.

Covering a variety of genres and periods from medieval epic to contemporary speculative fiction, Styling Texts explores the fascinating ways in which dress performs in literature. Numerous authors have made powerful-even radical-use of clothing and its implications, and the essays collected here demonstrate how scholarly attention to literary fashioning can contribute to a deeper understanding of texts, their contexts, and their innovations. These generative and engaging discussions focus on issues such as fashion and anti-fashion; clothing reform; transvestism; sartorial economics; style and the gaze; transgressive modes; and class, gender, or race "passing." This is the first academic volume to address such an extensive range of texts, inviting consideration of how fashionable desires and concerns not only articulate the aesthetics, subjectivities, and controversies of a given culture, but also communicate across temporal and spatial divisions. Styling Texts is an essential resource for anyone interested in the artistic representations and significations of dress.