Bestselling author Chuck Palahniuk (whose Choke is just out as an Anchor paperback) has just signed a new two-book deal with Gerry Howard, his Doubleday editor. It was a North American rights deal, signed with agent Edward Hibbert at Donadio & Olson, calling for the first of the pair, Period Revival, to be published in fall 2003. This takes the form of a fictional diary kept by a woman whose architect husband has tried to kill himself; she discovers he has left behind a series of notes in homes he has been remodeling, offering ever more disturbing revelations about his life and marriage. Howard says that though the book contains Palahniuk's trademark "outrageous black humor," it also represents a new direction in its poignant first-person narration by a female protagonist. Still awaited from Palahniuk's previous contract is a book of essays and reportage, Stranger Than Fiction, due in summer 2004.