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A memoir in which "writer Chris Offutt struggles to understand his recently deceased father based on his reading of the 400-plus novels [Andrew Offutt]--a well-known writer of pornography in the 1970s and 80s--left him in his will"--Publisher marketing.
Virgil, a soft-spoken Kentucky boy, must choose between the unwritten code of the hills and his own sense of morals when his hell-raising oldest brother Boyd is killed.
A literary master across genres, award-winning author Chris Offutt's latest novel, The Killing Hills, is a compelling, propulsive thriller in which a suspicious death exposes the loyalties and rivalries of a deep-rooted and fiercely private community in the Kentucky backwoods. Mick Hardin, a combat veteran now working as an Army CID agent, is home on a leave that is almost done. His wife is about to give birth, but they aren't getting along. His sister, newly risen to sheriff, has just landed her first murder case, and local politicians are pushing for city police or the FBI to take the case. Are they convinced she can't handle it, or is there something else at work? She calls on Mick who, w...
This collection of eight stories by the award-winning author of "The Good Brother" captures the lives of men shaped by the rough, isolated culture of rural Kentucky.
The author recalls his painful but ultimately revealing attempts to return home to the rural hills of Kentucky to give back to his community and to record the story of his parents-in-law, Holocaust survivors who had emigrated from Poland in 1946.
Kentucky straight is bourbon with no mixer. Kentucky Straight is Kentucky seen without nostalgic gloss. These riveting, often heartbreaking stories, take us through country that is unmapped. They are set in a nameless Appalachian community too small to be called a town, a place where wanting an education is a mark of ungodly arrogance and dowsing for water a legitimate occupation; where hunting is not a sport but a means of survival. These are stories of coal miners and backwoods medicine men, of gamblers and marijuana farmers, tales of real tragedy and unutterable strangeness that convey their sense of place so vividly that we feel its ground rise beneath our feet. Offutt has received a James Michener Grant and a Kentucky Arts Council Award.
"Army-CID-officer-cum-unofficial-PI Mick Hardin is up against unforeseen forces who will stop at nothing in this vividly atmospheric thriller from acclaimed novelist Chris Offutt. Chris Offutt isa literary master across genres, and his most recent novel THE KILLING HILLSwas one of his most successful, earning him a new audience and earningpraise from the likes of The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal,and Crime Reads. His latest book, Shifty'sBoys, is a compelling, propulsive thriller of murder and mayhem in thehills of eastern Kentucky. Mick Hardin is home on leave,recovering from an IED attack, when a body is found in the center of town. It'sBarney Kissick, the local heroin dealer, an...
From the critically acclaimed author of the novel The Good Brother and memoir My Father the Pornographer, Same River Twice is the second volume from an American literary star. “If you haven't read Chris Offutt, you've missed an accomplished and compelling writer” (Chicago Tribune). At the age of nineteen, Chris Offutt had already been rejected by the army, the Peace Corps, the park rangers, and the police. So he left his home in the Kentucky Appalachians and thumbed his way north—into a series of odd jobs and even stranger encounters with his fellow Americans. Fifteen years later, Offutt finds himself in a place he never thought he’d be: settled down with a pregnant wife. Writing from the banks of the Iowa River, where he came to rest, he intersperses the story of his youthful journeys with that of his journey to fatherhood in a memoir that is uniquely candid, occasionally brutal, and often wonderfully funny. As he reckons with the comforts and terrors of maturity, Offutt finally discovers what is best in life and in himself.
“A smart, rich country noir” from the acclaimed author Kentucky Straight and The Good Brother (Stewart O’Nan, bestselling author of Henry, Himself). Chris Offutt is an outstanding literary talent, whose work has been called “lean and brilliant” (The New York Times Book Review) and compared by reviewers to Tobias Wolff, Ernest Hemingway, and Raymond Carver. He’s been awarded the Whiting Writers Award for Fiction/Nonfiction and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Fiction Award, among numerous other honors. His first work of fiction in nearly two decades, Country Dark is a taut, compelling novel set in rural Kentucky from the Korean War to 1970. Tucker, a young veteran, returns...
This anthology of Mississippi crime fiction “has produced a unique, delicious flavor of noir” with stories by Ace Atkins, Megan Abott and more (New York Daily News). From poverty to state corruption, Mississippi has a well-deserved reputation for trouble. Could there be a connection between its many misfortunes and its rich literary legacy? Mississippians from Tennessee Williams and Eudora Welty to Richard Ford and John Grisham certainly know how to tell a good story. Now Mississippi Noir offers “a devilishly wrought introduction” to a new generation of “writers with a feel for Mississippi who are pursuing lonely, haunting paths of the imagination” (Associated Press). Mississippi Noir includes brand-new stories by Ace Atkins, William Boyle, Megan Abbott, Jack Pendarvis, Dominiqua Dickey, Michael Kardos, Jamie Paige, Jimmy Cajoleas, Chris Offutt, Michael Farris Smith, Andrew Paul, Lee Durkee, Robert Busby, John M. Floyd, RaShell R. Smith-Spears, and Mary Miller.