Make Something Up

Stories You Can't Unread

By: Chuck Palahniuk

Narrated by: Chuck Palahniuk, Scott Sowers, Rich Orlow, T. Ryder Smith, Luis Moreno, Ken Marks

Length: 11 hrs and 7 mins

Publisher's summary

For years Chuck Palahniuk has reserved his best storytelling for his readings, often choosing to read a new short story instead of whatever novel he is supposed to be promoting. Make Something Up compiles these previously unpublished tales for the very first time, plus the Byliner social media insta-classic "Phoenix" and Palahniuk's most notable pieces from Playboy.

©2015 Chuck Palahniuk (P)2015 Recorded Books

I loved this collection of short stories!

All of the short stories in this collection are great, but there are a few that stand out huge. I think it will be different for everyone who reads it.

Awkward & Riveting

So entertaining that you dread having to press pause. The stories are very clearly written by the same mind. Some of the stories are difficult to decipher exactly what is happening, but the phrasings & images conjured kept me engaged. The passage with only a semblance of story where the guy gets EVERY SINGLE saying incorrect is hilarious & brilliant. Thank you Mr. Fight Club for the trip

Typical Palahniuk, which is never a bad thing

Romance and Cannibal are my favorites. Expedition is very quotable. Also the second story, forgot it's name, for semantic reasons. I love Palahniuk word puzzles.

Chuck is a very good author but....

He is not a good narrator he has a really strange affectation that takes away from the story
It's hard to explain its a tempo thing
Great thought provoking ideas would have been better served by a good narrator unless he meant to deliver his material in this way , in that case I would say eh..

fantastic

loved almost every one of these stories. very well done, well written and narrated. hope more will follow

palahniuk packs a punch as always

the jokes!!! i have repeated them to many people and spread the joy. the stories are messed up as per usual. i always learn something about human behavior from our sweet Chuck. thanks for enlightening me.

Remember The Title

For those reviewers who thinks that these short stories are too vulgar, prude, or down right awful, you clearly don't understand the author and the title of this book. Chuck Palahniuk wrote "Make Something Up" for a reason. These stories is something that you will never think about, like the mentally disabled girl, a horse humping a man's leg, or the aardvark.

The stories that are presented in the book are so far fetch that you have to be laughing at what you are reading. It is meant not to be serious, but taken with a grain of salt. I found each story to be crude, raunchy and hilarious. Remember the title. "Make Something Up."

Equal parts self-indulgent, tedious, brilliant

Admittedly, being a wonder-kid fiction writer could be like any other job in a way: some days and some outputs are better than others. Palahniuk has a super-high verbal IQ, which can generate scorching passages that pull your mind very sideways. But these are rare, I find. At other times, I think, wow, fairly adolescent ramblings with a sprinkling of acid style, calculated to surprise or shock people who don't wander afar (at least imaginatively) very much. Yawn. It could be a sort of roller coaster ride for a bookish person who hasn't really thought about the experiential permutations of, say, bestiality. Psychedelia and its sequelae were always walking that knife-edge, between the wondrous and the mere ramblings of a fried brain trying too hard to sound colorful-crazy. If it can't compete with reality (a tall order!) why do it? At moments here I am pleasantly lofted skyward by something like a mashup of L.A. street gang argot with echos of Mississippi delta and even an Africa before that (somehow resonating linguistically out of these word structures, amazingly, poetically) spinning into collisions with half-sentences of icy modern high-technocratese. (The one with the dog and the nativity scene.) I love it as much as anything I ever read or heard. But then, another story along the line, we get some construct out of a freshman anthro class project with some hip jargon slathered over it and suddenly the whole mashup thing is beyond obvious and should never have gone longer than a paragraph. It is compounding familiar and even tired forms (detective story, puke) with dribbles of something from left field and, like many high wire acts, it alternates between wow and oops, um .... Sometimes the plot turn is standard lit, but amidst a few fireworks set off to distract the gullible. I could myself spiral off into a dissertation on the econ of being Chuck Palahniuk, as a sort of production line of sharp-articulate-crazy by the paragraph or whatever, which is what it can become at its most tedious, a sort of treadmill of wildness, if that computes, spewing from hamsters in a vending machine, but then I'd be too much like him. I do start to take on the coloration of any thinker I draw closer to.
Oh, and I think his own narration is best -- perfectly oddly laconic with the words.

Fucking hilarious! Chuck is God!

Never thought I'd enjoy a collection of short stories more than one of Chuck's novel masterpieces! My favorite publication so far...

Short stories not for the faint of heart

If you could sum up Make Something Up in three words, what would they be?

Didn't anticipate that!

What did you like best about this story?

The stories are well-written, which makes even the slow ones at least slightly interesting.

Which scene was your favorite?

AED self-lobotomy

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

Each of the stories give the readers something to think about, as they are a commentary on society in many ways.