Plagued with insomnia due to the cynical nature of his job (he investigates accidents for a carmaker in order to assess the cost-effectiveness of a recall), Fight Club's nameless narrator spends his evenings attending support groups for the terminally ill. Masquerading as a sufferer of various cancers, or as a victim of brain parasites, he discovers that losing all hope bestows a sense of freedom; Facing death, he feels more alive than ever before, and sleeps like a baby. Until Marla Singer — also a shamming support group groupie — ruins everything.

Marla not only invades his therapy sessions, but gradually insinuates herself into his private life as well, taking up with his housemate, the mysterious Tyler Durden. Tyler, a self-styled "minimum wage despoiler," works a succession of night jobs, taking perverse glee in sabotaging and blackmailing his employers. When, on a whim, the narrator and Tyler take turns punching out their frustrations on each other at a local bar, Fight Club is born.

"The first rule about fight club is that you don't talk about fight club."

Soon the disaffected drones of industry are spending their off hours beating each other to bloody pulp. After a night in Fight Club, they go back to their jobs bruised and battered, but with the liberating sense that they can handle anything. But FightClubis only the first stage of Tyler's anarchic master plan; Soon random acts of unkindness proliferate as mayhem and organized chaos spread across the country, culminating in a schizophrenic showdown on top of the world's tallest building.

But what do we really know about how Sybil came to be? In her news-breaking book Sybil Exposed, journalist Debbie Nathan gives proof that the allegedly true story was largely fabricated. The actual identity of Sybil (Shirley Mason) has been available for some years, as has the idea that the book might have been exaggerated. But in Sybil Exposed, Nathan reveals what really powered the legend: a trio of women—the willing patient, her ambitious shrink, and the imaginative journalist who spun their story into bestseller gold.

From horrendously irresponsible therapeutic practices—Sybil’s psychiatrist often brought an electroshock machine to Sybil’s apartment and climbed into bed with her while administering the treatment� to calculated business decisions (under an entity they named Sybil, Inc., the women signed a contract designating a three-way split of profits from the book and its spin-offs, including board games, tee shirts, and dolls), the story Nathan unfurls is full of over-the-top behavior. Sybil’s psychiatrist, driven by undisciplined idealism and galloping professional ambition, subjected the young woman to years of antipsychotics, psychedelics, uppers, and downers, including an untold number of injections with Pentothal, once known as “truth serum� but now widely recognized to provoke fantasies. It was during these “treatments� that Sybil produced rambling, garbled, and probably “false-memory”–based narratives of the hideous child abuse that her psychiatrist said caused her MPD. Sybil Exposed uses investigative journalism to tell a fascinating tale that reads like fiction but is fact. Nathan has followed an enormous trail of papers, records, photos, and tapes to unearth the lives and passions of these three women. The Sybil archive became available to the public only recently, and Nathan examined all of it and provides proof that the story was an elaborate fraud—albeit one that the perpetrators may have half-believed.

Before Sybil was published, there had been fewer than 200 known cases of MPD; within just a few years after, more than 40,000 people would be diagnosed with it. Set across the twentieth century and rooted in a time when few professional roles were available to women, this is a story of corrosive sexism, unchecked ambition, and shaky theories of psychoanalysis exuberantly and drastically practiced. It is the story of how one modest young woman’s life turned psychiatry on its head and radically changed the course of therapy, and our culture, as well.

The man who has given us some of the most exciting music of the past few decades has now given us a compelling and fascinating autobiography, featuring a concise discography and thirty-two pages of photographs.

After exploring the crazy world of pedigree dogs, Susann finally acquires a magnificent poodle, Josephine. The pampered poodle soon secures the dominant role in this budding relationship—and as our hirsute heroine dances through a ballet of network TV appearances, sidewalk encounters with Garbo, and doggy-bags from Sardi’s, even Susann’s dog-hating husband submits to her canine charms. Fans of Jacqueline Susann, kitsch lovers, and pet pamperers alike will be helpless to resist this laugh- out-loud classic.