coming soon: ‘pygmy’ from palahniuk

I know I'm probably the last to the party, but I just discovered Chuck Palahniuk's latest novel, Pygmy, will be hitting book shelves on 05 May 2009 (date subject to change). According to the man himself…

The lead character is a 13-year-old foreign exchange student sent to live with a suburban, white, middle-class family. Oh, and they're Christians. The visit is for six months, and he's one of a dozen similar kids, all shipped to America to live with typical families. The secret truth is that Pygmy is a terrorist, trained since infancy in martial arts, chemistry and radical hatred of the United States. He has six months to build a prize-winning project for the National Science Fair. If he succeeds, he and his project will go to Washington, D.C. for the finals competition -- where the project will explode, killing millions. So far, Gerry Howard says it's the best book I've done. Fingers crossed for luck.

(Gerry Howard is Doubleday's editor-at-large.) I don't know. The plot sounds jacked (wait, it's a Palahniuk novel… please strike that statement from the record), but if any author can make such a story a compelling read it's Chucky P.

xx