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    People, Places, Things: My Human Landmarks
    People, Places, Things: My Human Landmarks
    People, Places, Things: My Human Landmarks

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    Ebook37 pages17 minutes

    People, Places, Things: My Human Landmarks

    By Chuck Palahniuk

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Nobody excavates the landscape of American darkness in cultural and personal terms the way Chuck Palahniuk does. Nobody captures the tiny moments that change our hearts forever with such stark, clear-eyed beauty. He takes us here, somehow gently, into that very darkness, which ripples beneath us, between us, and silently within us.

    —Clark Gregg, director and actor

    The first rule of writing for the world-renowned author of Fight Club, Choke, and Snuff, Chuck Palahniuk, is to expect the unexpected. As Vanity Fair declared about him, “He makes nihilism fun.” In his bold new Everand Original, Palahniuk takes a rare look at his own life, the source material for his bestselling, zeitgeist-changing, and searingly memorable dark fantasies.

    He not only shares the challenges he’s overcome and the nightmares he still lives with but also names the people, places, and things that have inspired him and made him the uncommon artist he is today. A devoted student and longtime teacher of writing, Palahniuk structures this very personal reflection as a lesson in how to tell a story and characteristically opts for a thrillingly atypical approach. He writes, “This landscape will unfold more like collage than any highway printed on a map. My point is: It’s not what’s inside your clothes, it’s how you take your clothes off.”

    Via direct and indirect routes, the reader is toured from the smallest of small towns in which Palahniuk grew up—Burbank, Washington—to cities made famous by serial killers; from a weight room in a dank cinder-block bunker under the bleachers of the local high school, where young Palahniuk strengthened his body and mind, to a recurring dream that may not be a dream at all but a childhood memory that to this day makes crossing bridges sheer terror for him.

    He also revisits some of his influences—Vonnegut, Heller, Salinger—men who coped with the traumas they endured in war by using them to fuel their creative work. And for the very first time, he divulges another crucial influence: Noburo Fukuda, an unsung hero who was often derided as “nuts” and “queer” by the mostly white community in and around Burbank. On a family day trip to a series of overheated sheds for locomotive and stock-car repair, Palahniuk, just a boy, opened a door to an adjoining shed and discovered an unlikely paradise: a Japanese garden alive with hummingbirds, columbine, and phlox, with waterfalls coursing down a mountain at its center. Fukuda, an immigrant from Japan, freely gave locals this sanctuary, a place to which Palahniuk still returns in his imagination to fend off his own traumas. Fukuda also gave the author a model of what one man can do alone, through imagination and hard work, showed him that being different, an outsider, has unexpected gifts that can make for unexpected beauty.

    Poetic and explosive, profoundly human and intimate, People, Places, and Things is a tribute to every person compelled to defy convention in pursuit of their own vision. And, more, it’s an invitation, with every line, every digression and confession, and every leap taken, to convert the messy and startling, the ugly and beautiful stuff of life, into art—not just by breaking the rules, as Palahniuk does here, but by risking your very skin to find your own.

    Editor's Note

    Unexpected personal essay…

    Palahniuk knows how to tell a story in unexpected, fascinating ways, and this personal essay (a Scribd Original) from the “Fight Club” author doesn’t disappoint. Palahniuk shares the people, places, and things that shaped his writing growing up in the Pacific Northwest — from serial killers to secret gardens to Sears catalogs.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherEverand Originals
    Release dateOct 27, 2021
    ISBN9781094412887
    Author

    Chuck Palahniuk

    Chuck Palahniuk’s fourteen novels include the bestselling Snuff; Rant; Haunted; Lullaby; Fight Club, which was made into a film by director David Fincher; Diary; Survivor; Invisible Monsters; and Choke, which was made into a film by director Clark Gregg. He is also the author of the nonfiction profile of Portland, Fugitives and Refugees, and the nonfiction collection Stranger Than Fiction. His story collection Make Something Up was a widely banned bestseller. His graphic novel Fight Club II hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. He’s also the author of Fight Club III and the coloring books Bait and Legacy, as well as the writing guide Consider This. He lives in the Pacific Northwest.

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    Reviews for People, Places, Things

    4.5/5

    64 ratings8 reviews

    What our readers think

    Readers find this title to be a collection of expertly tailored stories that offer a powerful and notable new view of the world. The writing is powerful and the sentences and phrases stay with you, making you more calm towards everyone you'll ever meet. The book is friendly, teaching, amusing, and delightful. Overall, readers are grateful for Chuck's stories and eagerly await more from him.

    What did you think?

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      Powerful writing offering a notable, new view of the world we live in.
    • 5/5
      Loved this little masterpiece. This little thing had sentences and phrases that are going to stay with you, and make you more calm towards everyone you'll ever meet or come across. Glad I found this.
    • 5/5
      A wonderful story about Chucky P and the pivotal events and people that turned him into a writer who had something to say.
    • 5/5
      Usual Chuck. I read every sentence he writes with the terrifying thought that one day he might be hit by a bus. Go to sleep and never open his eyes again. Choke on a green olive or a piece of bread.
      Then it’ll be just his laptop shut and no more new stuff from Chuck.
      That’ll be the beginning of a long endless mourning. Until then, I’ll keep reading his stories.
      I owe Chuck a lot. He doesn’t know it. But I’ll always be grateful. For everything.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Expertly tailored stories that blue angel in and out of each other's airspace. The way Chuck processes his life is on full display here. While the topics are niche the lessons are all encompassing.

      3 people found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Friendly from the first page to the last. Mr Palahniuk uses this essay to teach, amuse, and delight.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 5/5
      What the fuck?!

      (7 more words needed before review can be posted)

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Stories told from an old friend who is battle-weary from life's trials but misty-eyed from its wonders.

      2 people found this helpful

    Book preview

    People, Places, Things - Chuck Palahniuk

    People, Places, Things

    My Human Landmarks

    By Chuck Palahniuk

    SCRIBD ORIGINALS

    Copyright © 2021 by Chuck Palahniuk

    All rights reserved

    Cover design by Catherine Casalino

    ISBN: 9781094412887

    First e-book edition: October 2021

    Scribd, Inc.

    San Francisco, California

    Scribd.com

    For more, visit www.scribd.com and follow @Scribd on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

    Picture1

    WHEN YOU’RE LEARNING TO WRITE, never start with your most important story. My advice is: Point the camera at anything else. Don’t panic. Anything you choose is still you.

    This landscape will unfold more like collage than any highway printed on a map. My point is: It’s not what’s inside your clothes, it’s how you take your clothes off.

    Case in point, a friend named Suzy used to write photo captions for a glossy shelter magazine. Some outfit like House Beautiful or Better Homes and Gardens, it would send Suzy a batch of garden pictures and she’d fly off to meet with the gardener. Usually a rich Somebody. This rich so-and-so—who used summer and winter as verbs—Suzy would tweeze out their story of how the Portulaca grandiflora came to be so perfectly espaliered and so on and so on. It was her job. Well, a job. Sometimes she got lucky.

    Baby steps we’re taking. Word by word, we’re about to cross a lot of territory, an ever-increasing landscape of human landmarks, and the goal is to not lose any stragglers. Picture pouring a swallow of water back and forth between two tablespoons, two hundred times, and you can see the challenge here.

    One baby step backward to last week. At a resale shop in Portland I found a painting of a man in a wheelchair. He holds a squinting pug dog on his lap. The man’s hair is flaming red. Without reading the tag, I knew this was the cartoonist John Callahan. What a score! The artist hadn’t signed it, but the tag said

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