Publisher, Random House Audiobooks (May 2003)

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Medical school dropout Victor Mancini comes up with a complicated but ingenious scam to pay for his mother's elder care - pretend to be choking in a restaurant and con the individuals who "save" him into giving him money.

"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