Status
Available
Call number
Series
Publication
London Vintage 2004
Description
Want to know where Chuck Palahniuk’s tonsils currently reside? Been looking for a naked mannequin to hide in your kitchen cabinets? Curious about Chuck’s debut in an MTV music video? What goes on at the Scum Center? How do you get to the Apocalypse Café? In the closest thing he may ever write to an autobiography, Chuck Palahniuk provides answers to all these questions and more as he takes you through the streets, sewers, and local haunts of Portland, Oregon. According to Katherine Dunn, author of the cult classic Geek Love, Portland is the home of America’s “fugitives and refugees.” Get to know these folks, the “most cracked of the crackpots,” as Palahniuk calls them, and come along with him on an adventure through the parts of Portland you might not otherwise believe actually exist. No other travel guide will give you this kind of access to “a little history, a little legend, and a lot of friendly, sincere, fascinating people who maybe should’ve kept their mouths shut.” Here are strange personal museums, weird annual events, and ghost stories. Tour the tunnels under downtown Portland. Visit swingers’ sex clubs, gay and straight. See Frances Gabe’s famous 1940s Self-Cleaning House. Look into strange local customs like the I-Tit-a-Rod Race and the Santa Rampage. Learn how to talk like a local in a quick vocabulary lesson. Get to know, I mean really get to know, the animals at the Portland zoo. Oh, the list goes on and on.… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member SnoopingBunny
A good off-beat "guide" to the great city of Portland, Oregon. An entertaining and, yes, moderately strange memoir from Chuck Palahniuk.
LibraryThing member derfla3101980
Mostly a guide to Chucks Portland, Kinda want to go to Oregon.For fans only
LibraryThing member arsmith
As far as travel books go, this is a pretty interesting one. I was in Portland for a year and still never did and saw all the things in this book. Some insight into Palahniuk’s zaniness.
LibraryThing member subbobmail
Lately I have been considering a move to the other Portland, the one in Oregon with more culture and less snow. The first book I could find about P/O was Fugitives and Refugees by Chuch Palahniuk. It did not inflame my desire to pull up stakes.
Palahniuk specializes in gross, scary, oddball,
To be fair, Palahniuk does throw in a healthy amount of info on eateries, gardens, zoos, et cetera. And his beyond-the-fringe style can be very vivid, as a true tale about a mother tending her dying son attests. But all in all, Palahniuk left a bad taste in my mouth. I don't want to live in the underbelly, thanks.
Palahniuk specializes in gross, scary, oddball,
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grotesque fiction: Fight Club, Haunted, et cetera. So naturally his take on P/O is full of stuff you wouldn't want your mom to see. Here are all the sex clubs! Here's where I threw my tonsils out a window! Here are all the supposedly haunted old buildings! Here are the drag queens! Here's the underground tunnel where a performance artist threw a "fetus" at me!To be fair, Palahniuk does throw in a healthy amount of info on eateries, gardens, zoos, et cetera. And his beyond-the-fringe style can be very vivid, as a true tale about a mother tending her dying son attests. But all in all, Palahniuk left a bad taste in my mouth. I don't want to live in the underbelly, thanks.
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LibraryThing member dczapka
Chuck Palahniuk's nonfiction is so drastically different from his fiction that, if it weren't for the comfort and confidence of his voice, you'd think they were two totally different authors.
In this book, he tries his hand at something akin to a travel guide in a surprisingly firm sense: he takes
And while most of the stops he suggests are far from the kind of extreme things you'll see in Fight Club or Haunted, they are just off the beaten path enough to raise a few eyebrows. Yet Palahniuk treats all of them with a tone that is equal parts journalistic detachment, fascination, and genuine interest, turning them not into a catalog of freaks but simply an eclectic set of destinations that are treated with far more respect than they are revulsion.
It is this smoothness of delivery that makes what could have been an otherwise mundane or macabre text become something truly intriguing and compulsively readable.
In this book, he tries his hand at something akin to a travel guide in a surprisingly firm sense: he takes
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us to various spots in Portland, often elaborating for pages when he's got a great story to tell, but willing to settle on a mere paragraph when all he wants is for you to take notice. Interspersed with these sightseeing suggestions are "postcards," short autobiographical interludes of his own twisted history in Portland that add a personal insight to some of the demented destinations he takes us to.And while most of the stops he suggests are far from the kind of extreme things you'll see in Fight Club or Haunted, they are just off the beaten path enough to raise a few eyebrows. Yet Palahniuk treats all of them with a tone that is equal parts journalistic detachment, fascination, and genuine interest, turning them not into a catalog of freaks but simply an eclectic set of destinations that are treated with far more respect than they are revulsion.
It is this smoothness of delivery that makes what could have been an otherwise mundane or macabre text become something truly intriguing and compulsively readable.
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LibraryThing member araridan
the only book worth reading by Palahniuk...unusual places to visit in Portland, Oregon
LibraryThing member BenjaminHahn
As a city I love Portland, and I think I love it more because of this book. I wish every big city had Chuck Palahnuik to write a guide for it. I haven't finished this yet because I want to get it done right before I go back for a visit. So far, a tight little book with a beautiful map on the inside
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cover. Great, bizarre stories with some creepy things you just don't want to know about. Show Less
LibraryThing member yougotamber
This book makes me want to take a trip to Portland. There's enough information here to have a very unique trip! Also the stories told between the guides were very enlightening, especially to a fan of Pahalniuk.
LibraryThing member Spoonbridge
On a recent trip to Portland, Oregon (that eternal rival for Minneapolis’ title of “most bike friendly city”), I found that Fugitives and Refugees, Chuck Palahniuk's autobiographical travel guide to the iconic Pacific Northwest city was an invaluable companion to my visit. Describing the
Particularly useful was the glossary and list of slang and pronunciations so the visitor can blend in with the locals. In the years since this book has been written, as indicated the presence of the tv series Portlandia, Portland continued to rise in prominence as a home for America’s “fugitives and refugees” (as Palahniuk attributes to Geek Love and Portland-dweller Katherine Dunn) and as an urban renaissance “city that works. It is interesting to see in Palahniuk’s account the very beginnings of this growth of Portland as a city “young people go to retire,” a place more than just a grungy small Pacific Northwest town filled with weirdos, but as a poster city for such a movement. Portland, I must say, is on my short list of American cities were I ever to leave Minnesota, and Fugitives and Refugees, I feel, presents a thought provoking background.
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towns various quirks; the Voodoo Doughnuts, Shanghai Tunnels, and Powell’s City of Books (all of which I, tourist that I am, had to experience on my stopover), Palahniuk’s essays present a lot more than a mere travel guide. In spite of being more than a decade old at this point, Palahniuk’s personal tour through a few of the odder denizens and locations in a very odd city paints a vivid and affectionate portrait of the history and background of Portland, both in the grand scheme and in Palahniuk’s personal relationship with the city. Exploring the city’s seedy underbelly of sex shows and hauntings, Palahniuk’s ties his own experiences deeply into the culture of Portland through various “postcards” written from different periods of his life there. Particularly useful was the glossary and list of slang and pronunciations so the visitor can blend in with the locals. In the years since this book has been written, as indicated the presence of the tv series Portlandia, Portland continued to rise in prominence as a home for America’s “fugitives and refugees” (as Palahniuk attributes to Geek Love and Portland-dweller Katherine Dunn) and as an urban renaissance “city that works. It is interesting to see in Palahniuk’s account the very beginnings of this growth of Portland as a city “young people go to retire,” a place more than just a grungy small Pacific Northwest town filled with weirdos, but as a poster city for such a movement. Portland, I must say, is on my short list of American cities were I ever to leave Minnesota, and Fugitives and Refugees, I feel, presents a thought provoking background.
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LibraryThing member drewsof
3.5, teetering towards a 4, out of 5. I've read enough interviews with Palahniuk and seen him enough times now to know one refrain of his perfectly: he wants to capture moments. That's his driving force, as a writer: to capture a moment for posterity. Maybe it's a perfect sentence, maybe it's a
More at RB:
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place he loves, maybe it's a person he knows or an anecdote they told. And that's what he does here, in an unadorned and beautiful way. Yes, this is a travel guide - but it's also a reflection on a time and a place and a man. Portland has changed a whole lot in the 10 years since this book came out and I'll bet it'll change more before I go back again... but it gave us the man who wrote all these wacky books. This was his chance to give a little something back.More at RB:
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LibraryThing member drewsof
3.5, teetering towards a 4, out of 5. I've read enough interviews with Palahniuk and seen him enough times now to know one refrain of his perfectly: he wants to capture moments. That's his driving force, as a writer: to capture a moment for posterity. Maybe it's a perfect sentence, maybe it's a
More at RB:
Show More
place he loves, maybe it's a person he knows or an anecdote they told. And that's what he does here, in an unadorned and beautiful way. Yes, this is a travel guide - but it's also a reflection on a time and a place and a man. Portland has changed a whole lot in the 10 years since this book came out and I'll bet it'll change more before I go back again... but it gave us the man who wrote all these wacky books. This was his chance to give a little something back.More at RB:
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LibraryThing member SadieBabie
This was...ok. Its a book about Portland, giving his insider's view of it and it is interspersed with little memoir postcards. The memoir parts of it were good, very entertaining and a little twisted. I enjoyed them. However, they were slightly fleeting. The rest of the book reads way too much like
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your average tourist guide, no matter the "alternative" view of Portland he gives. It was interesting to read, and funny in places, but I thought he'd have put a little more creative spin on things. It kind of felt like a quickly tossed together thing to feed the flames of Palahnuik fandom. But I still think he's a really good writer. Show Less
Subjects
Language
Original publication date
2003
ISBN
0099464675 / 9780099464679