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Choke

By: Chuck Palahniuk
Narrated by: Chuck Palahniuk
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About this listen

 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the bestselling author of the generation-defining classic Fight Club comes a powerful (and hilarious) novel about the addictive power of sex, the terrors of aging, the ugly truth about historical theme parks, and much else ...

“Sheer, anarchic fierceness of imagination . . . [A] raw and vital book.” —The New York Times

Victor Mancini, a medical-school dropout, is an antihero for our deranged times. Needing to pay elder care for his mother, Victor has devised an ingenious scam: he pretends to choke on pieces of food while dining in upscale restaurants. He then allows himself to be “saved” by fellow patrons who, feeling responsible for Victor’s life, go on to send checks to support him. When he’s not pulling this stunt, Victor cruises sexual addiction recovery workshops for action, visits his addled mom, and spends his days working at a colonial theme park. His creator, Chuck Palahniuk, is the visionary we need and the satirist we deserve. Dark Humour Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Literature & Fiction Psychological

Critic Reviews

Praise for Chuck Palahniuk:

"Palahniuk is one of the freshest, most intriguing voices to appear in a long time. He rearranges Vonnegut's sly humor, DeLillo's mordant social analysis, and Pynchon's antic surrealism (or is it R. Crumb's?) into a gleaming puzzle palace all his own."
--Newsday

"Palahniuk displays a Swiftian gift for satire, as well as a knack for crafting mesmerizing sentences that loom with stark, prickly prose and repetitive rhythms."
--San Francisco Examiner

"Even I can't write this well."
--Thom Jones

"Palahniuk's language is urgent and tense, touched with psychopathic brilliance, his images dead-on accurate....[He] is an author who makes full use of the alchemical powers of fiction to synthesize a universe that mirrors our own fiction as a way of illuminating the world without obliterating its complexity."
--L.A. Weekly

"Maybe our generation has found its Don DeLillo."
--Bret Easton Ellis
All stars
Most relevant
Still not sure how I feel about this book. Any book that takes me a considerable amount of time to read I consider a fail. This has been one. Chuck’s performance is dry. But it does add some grunge to the story. The story is also rather slow, and uninspiring but still interesting in the characters and the taboo of the topics. I found quite a lot of inconsistencies in the characters choices and not in a way that could be justified to elicit a response. Overall I would talk about the book but save anyone the trouble of actually listening to the dry performance and the gritty and fairly banal story.

Love it or hate it. I’d give it 51/100. A mere pass.

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