Chuck Palahniuk’s world has always been, well, different from yours and mine. In his first collection of nonfiction, Chuck Palahniuk brings us into this world, and gives us a glimpse of what inspires his fiction.At the Rock Creek Lodge Testicle Festival in Missoula, Montana, average people perform public sex acts on an outdoor stage. In a mansion once occupied by The Rolling Stones, Marilyn Manson reads his own Tarot cards and talks sweetly to his beautiful actress girlfriend. Across the country, men build their own full-size castles and rocketships that will send them into space. Palahniuk himself experiments with steroids, works on an assembly line by day and as a hospice volunteer by night, and experiences the brutal murder of his father by a white supremacist. With this new direction, Chuck Palahniuk has proven he can do anything.

The New York Times – Janet Maslin

This collection is as interesting for its insights into how that fiction takes shape, and for autobiographical glimmers, as it is for its ostensible talking points about submarines, rescue dogs or profile subjects like the writers Andrew Sullivan and Amy Hempel. Throughout the book he can be found formulating the kinds of neat, tricky locutions and singsong repetitions that turn up in his fiction.