Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk in Portland, Oregon (2003)

by Chuck Palahniuk

Series: Crown Journeys

Members	Reviews	Popularity	Average rating	Mentions
1,625	16	10,912	(3.42)	12
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)

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Showing 1-5 of 16 (next | show all)

Fresco e spassoso, una sorta di Lonely Planet di Portland vista con gli occhi di Palahniuk. Una lettura leggera, magari per spezzare tra due libri più pesanti. Non è un capolavoro, chiaramente, ma vale comunque la pena leggerlo, perlomeno se avete già esaurito le opere maggiori. (

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LuigiGreco | Apr 12, 2023 |

Random stories and tidbits about Portland from ficion writer Chuck Palahniuk ([book: Fight Club]). It gives a good sense of the quirks and eccentricities of Portlanders past and present (the fugitives and refugees of the title). Want to know where to find ghosts? Sex shows? Or random museums? Palahniuk has it covered. At 175 pages it isn't exhaustive, and inevitably places are lost to the change always afoot in cities, but it's a quick, fun read. (

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stevepilsner | Jan 3, 2022 |

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 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. (

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SadieBabie | Jun 23, 2018 |

[a: Chuck Palahniuk|2546|Chuck Palahniuk|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1391203076p2/2546.jpg] seems much better suited to this non-fiction writing than his usual books. In [b: Fugitives and Refugees|22289|Fugitives and Refugees A Walk in Portland, Oregon|Chuck Palahniuk|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1429316063s/22289.jpg|141049] he manages to convey the heart and strange soul of Portland in a very human way. The oddities that he mentions he does so with a humble love and wry smirk that is difficult to not find utterly endearing. It made me want to visit Portland rather badly, though I unfortunately didn't quite have a chance.

The section on Santa Clause is particularly memorable. As is, always, the myriad of strange societies he seems to have taken part in. (

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Lepophagus | Jun 14, 2018 |

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 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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drewsof | Sep 30, 2015 |

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Contemporanea [Mondadori, IT]

Crown Journeys

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Amazon.com Best Books (2003)

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Canonical title

Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk in Portland, Oregon

Original title

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Original publication date

2003

People/Characters

Important places

Portland, Oregon, USA

Oregon, USA

USA

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Related movies

Epigraph

Dedication

For my grandmother, Ruth Tallent 1920-2002

First words

"Everyone in Portland is living a minimum of three lives," says Katherine Dunn, the author of Geek Love.

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(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)

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▾References

References to this work on external resources.

Wikipedia in English (7)

24 Hour Church of Elvis

Culture of Oregon

Fugitives and Refugees

History of Portland, Oregon

Peace Candle of the World

The Quest (Portland, Oregon)

Timeline of Portland, Oregon

▾Book descriptions

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.

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