Out of the Woods: Stories - Softcover

Offutt, Chris

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0684853760 ISBN 13: 9780684853765

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2000

Synopsis

Seven years ago, Chris Offutt made his literary debut with Kentucky Straight, a fiercely original collection that earned him not only critical praise but many prestigious awards.
The eight new stories in Out of the Woods mark Offutt's return to the form in which he first displayed his astonishing talent. Offutt, who "draws landscape and constructs dialogue with the eyes and ears of a native son" (The Miami Herald), is on strong home turf here, capturing those who have left the Kentucky hills and long to return. These are stories of gravediggers and drifters, gamblers and truck drivers a long way from home, tales that are so full of hard edges they can't help but tell some hard truths.

About this title

Review:

Out of the Woods starts with one man leaving his Kentucky hollow and ends with another who realizes he can't return. In between, Chris Offutt's broke, lonely, or just plain down-on-their-luck characters find out exactly how difficult it is to go home again, and how equally difficult it is to stop wishing they could. The critically acclaimed author of The Good Brother (a novel), as well as a memoir and a previous collection of stories, Offutt writes with rare honesty, insight, and restraint. "Sometimes I don't think I've done anything to leave my mark in this world. I'm the kind of person the world leaves a mark on," admits the narrator of "Two-Eleven All Around." The same might be said of all Offutt's Appalachian transplants, from the small-town sheriff of "Melungeons," forever marked by the violence and beauty of his mountain upbringing, to the rootless ex-con of "Moscow, Idaho," who wonders "if he'd ever find a woman, a job he liked, or a town he wanted to stay in." These lives are rendered in prose stripped so bare it reads like poetry--and yet is not without its own flinty wit. Given his first glimpse of his brother-in-law's corpse, the protagonist of the title story allows as how "he didn't look dead, but Gerald didn't think he looked too good either. He looked like a man with a bad hangover that he might shake by dinner." These are characters who get inside your head and stories worth reading again and again. As spare and simple as a Shaker chair, Offutt's tales should prove every bit as enduring. --Mary Park

From the Author:

Chris Offutt grew up in the Appalachian Mountains of eastern Kentucky and has held more than fifty part-time jobs. For his first three books -- Kentucky Straight, The Same River Twice, and The Good Brother -- he received numerous awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Whiting Award. He currently lives in Iowa City, where he is a visiting professor at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0684853760
• ISBN 13: 9780684853765
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 176