Pygmy (eBook)

Description

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A gang of adolescent terrorists, a spelling bee, and a terrible plan masquerading as a science project: This is Operation Havoc.
 
Pygmy is one of a handful of young adults from a totalitarian state sent to the US disguised as exchange students. Living with American families to blend in, they are planning an unspecified act of massive terrorism that will bring this big dumb country and its fat dumb inhabitants to their knees. Palahniuk depicts Midwestern life through the eyes of this indoctrinated little killer in a cunning double-edged satire of American xenophobia.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

About the Author

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CHUCK PALAHNIUK’s nine previous novels are the bestselling Fight Club, which was made into a film by director David Fincher; Survivor; Invisible Monsters; Choke, which was made into a film by director Clark Gregg; Lullaby; Diary; Haunted; Rant; and Snuff. He is also the author of Fugitives and Refugees, a nonfiction profile of Portland, Oregon, published as part of the Crown Journeys series, and the nonfiction collection Stranger Than Fiction. He lives in the Pacific Northwest.

Praise for Pygmy…

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"In a time of justifiable concern about terrorism, Palahniuk has written a hilarious novel about an unlikely terrorist cell: foreign-exchange students who arrive at a midwestern city, bent on unleashing 'Operation Havoc.'The story unfolds in a series of dispatches from an unnamed 13-year-old agent, dubbed 'Pygmy' by the locals. (That his reports are in broken English makes no sense, but the prose provides terrific opportunities for humor even if, at book length, it requires some effort.) Despite Pygmy’s command of the deadly arts, he is still a 13-year-old, prone to unwanted erections, and he is not the coolest kid in the cadre, either. The frisson around his internal, target-acquiring narrative, the locals’ unwitting perception of him, and his outsider’s view of the routine humiliations inflicted upon high-school youth is so spot-on it produces a sense of déjà vu: surely someone would have thought of this before. ('Dispatch Sixth,' treating Junior Swing Choir, is laugh-out-loud funny.) This isn’t for everyone: as ever, Palahniuk is interested in pushing the limits of what readers will tolerate in terms of clinically described sex and gore. However, in contrasting the mindless sloganeering of totalitarianism with the anything-goes nature of Americanism, his own message is anything but subversive. By now, the author’s fans know who they are. Those left cold by last year’s Snuff (2008) will welcome his return to the fine form of Fight Club (1996). Palahniuk leaps over the line of good taste—and lands squarely on his feet."
— Keir Graff, Booklist (starred review)