Chris Offutt

Andrew Offutt's writing career began as a strategy to pay for his son's orthodontic needs and peaked during the 1970s when the commercial popularity of the erotic novel reached its height. After his death, his son inherited 400 novels of pornography written by his father. As Chris began to examine his father's manuscripts and memorabilia, he realized he finally had an opportunity to gain insight into the difficult, mercurial, sometimes cruel man he'd loved and feared in equal measure, and set out to make sense of a complicated father-son relationship.

A Memoir

My Father, the Pornographer

Acclaimed literary author Chris Offutt now delivers a breakout novel--The Killing Hills, a literary crime novel set in the Kentucky hills in which an Army CID agent on leave ends up investigating a murder and setting the secretive holler clans on edge.

The Killing Hills

Chris Offutt's long-awaited return to fiction after nearly two decades, Country Dark is a fierce noir-inflected novel about a good man pushed by circumstance into crime.

Country Dark

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.

Stories

Kentucky Straight

Army cop-turned-small-town-investigator Mick Hardin returns to the Kentucky hills in this second vividly atmospheric thriller from acclaimed literary crime novelist Chris Offutt. A literary master across genres, award-winning author Chris Offutt's latest book, Shifty's Boys, is a compelling, propulsive thriller that returns to Appalachia. Mick Hardin is an Army CID officer home on leave, recovering from an IED attack and flirting with prescription painkillers, when a body is found in the center of town. It's Barney Kissick, the local heroin dealer, and the city police see it as an occupational hazard. But when Barney's mother, Shifty, asks Mick to take a look, it seems there's more to the killing than it seems. Mick should be rehabbing his leg, signing his divorce papers, and getting out of town--and most of all, staying out of the way of his sister Linda's reelection as Sheriff--but he keeps on looking, and suddenly he's getting shot at himself. A dark, pacy crime novel about grief and revenge, and the surprises hidden below the surface, Shifty's Boys is a tour de force that confirms Chris Offutt's Mick Hardin as one of the most appealing new investigators in fiction.

Shifty's Boys

Nelle terre di nessuno

Chris Offuttauthor of the critically acclaimed story collectionsKentucky Straight and Out of the Woods,the novelThe Good Brother,and the memoir No Heroes, lives in Iowa City, Iowa.

The Same River Twice

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.

Out of the Woods

Tells the stories of the coal miners, gamblers, marijuana farmers, and backwoods medicine men living in an isolated Appalachian community

Code of the Hills

Mi padre, el pornógrafo

bell hooks

Dorothy Allison

Connie May Fowler

Jayne Anne Phillips

Michael Croley

Silas House

Carter Sickels

Jason Howard

Julia Watts

Ann Pancake

Jeff Mann

Aaron Smith

Lisa Lewis

Crystal Wilkinson

Charles Dodd White

Pinckney Benedict

Mary Crockett Hill

Melissa Range

Kathryn Stripling Byer

Joyce Dyer

Jacinda Townsend

Jessie van Eerden

David Huddle

Sheldon Lee Compton

Sarah Einstein

Jane Springer

Richard Currey

Rob Amberg

RJ Gibson

Tennessee Jones

Ida Stewart

In Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean, Adrian Blevins and Karen Salyer McElmurray collect essays from today’s finest established and emerging writers with roots in Appalachia. Together, these essays take the theme of silencing in Appalachian culture, whether the details of that theme revolve around faith, class, work, or family legacies.

In essays that take wide-ranging forms—making this an ideal volume for creative nonfiction classes—contributors write about families left behind, hard-earned educations, selves transformed, identities chosen, and risks taken. They consider the courage required for the inheritances they carry.

Toughness and generosity alike characterize works by Dorothy Allison, bell hooks, Silas House, and others. These writers travel far away from the boundaries of a traditional Appalachia, and then circle back—always—to the mountains that made each of them the distinctive thinking and feeling people they ultimately became. The essays in Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean are an individual and collective act of courage.

Meditations on the Forbidden from Contemporary Appalachia

Walk Til the Dogs Get Mean

Lejos del bosque

Los cerros de la muerte

Los hijos de Shifty

A casa e ritorno

Country dark

Mark Powell

Appalachia Now hops on the back of a motorcycle for a wild ride through the hills we know best--Vicco, Hazard, branches, mine access roads. Fiddle tunes and black lung and the photoelectric gleam of stars. But these haunting stories take us way beyond the familiar. They are as skillfully wrought with the visible world as they are with the luminous being in the hollow of a cupped hand. I couldn't put this book down and when I did, my heart ached to step back inside the pages. Karen McElmurray

Short Stories of Contemporary Appalachia

Appalachia Now

Il fratello buono

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 Novel

The Good Brother

Chris Offutt

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