THE SAME RIVER TWICE (Signed First Edition)

Offutt, Chris.

ISBN 10: 0671787349 / ISBN 13: 9780671787349

Published by Simon & Schuster, 1993

About this Item

NY: Simon Schuster, 1993. First Edition. First printing. Memoir. Author's second book. New in dust jacket. SIGNED by author on title page. An unread pristine copy in archival-quality mylar dust jacket wrapper. 0.0.

Seller Inventory # 2690

Bibliographic Details

• Title: THE SAME RIVER TWICE (Signed First Edition)
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication Date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0671787349
• ISBN 13: 9780671787349
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: F.
• Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)

About this title

Synopsis

A consistently reflective, often riotous narrative of the author's progress into manhood, from trouble and conflict in his native Appalachia, through a tour of America's underbelly, to his marriage and settlement on the Iowa River. Tour.

Reviews

What keeps this first book by Offut from becoming a familiar nonfictional Bildungsroman is the author's sensitivity to nature and his lyrical prose in writing about it. Offut, however, is far less successful in describing people: his memoir is populated by a predictable array of derelicts, oddballs and near-psychotics as he journeys around the U.S., dreaming alternately of becoming an actor, a painter, a playwright and a poet, yet usually doing little to realize his aspirations. Only those who are intrigued by America's social underside will enjoy Offut's portraits of human flotsam. The underlying plot of the book concerns his wife's pregnancy and the birth of their first child, a son, but neither Offut's approach to nor his words about this subject are original.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A new and promising writer, Offutt records his rocky road to manhood and becoming a writer. Whether hitching a ride with a dangerous character or working as a walrus in a traveling circus, he felt compelled to keep a journal. He left Appalachia at 19 and took a decade to realize he was sinking ever deeper into failure. Finally, he changed course, got married, and, with the encouragement of his wife, enrolled in a writing program. The results were a 1990 Michener Award for short fiction and a collection of stories, Kentucky Straight (Random, 1992). In his current volume, by turns lyrical and graphic, outrageous and sensitive, tragic and hilarious, Offutt writes of the 29 stitches his wife required after childbirth, how his mother spoke "gentle as rain," and of the twinkling of beaver saliva on fresh wood chips in the Iowa woods where he now lives. Strong writing in a memoir of particular interest to academic libraries.
- Nancy Shires, East Carolina Univ., Greenville, N.C.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.