Kentucky Straight: Stories

Literary crime fiction master Tom Franklin curates this volume of stellar noir from the Deep South.

After inheriting 400 novels of pornography written by his father in the 1970s and ‘80s, critically acclaimed author Chris Offutt sets out to make sense of a complicated father-son relationship in this carefully observed, beautifully written memoir.

When Andrew Offutt died, his son, Chris, inherited a desk, a rifle, and eighteen hundred pounds of pornographic fiction. Andrew had been considered the “king of twentieth-century smut,” with a writing career that began as a strategy to pay for his son’s orthodontic needs and soon took on a life of its own, peaking during the 1970s when the commercial popularity of the erotic novel reached its height.

With his dutiful wife serving as typist, Andrew wrote from their home in the Kentucky hills, locked away in an office no one dared intrude upon. In this fashion he wrote more than four hundred novels, including pirate porn, ghost porn, zombie porn, and secret agent porn. The more he wrote, the more intense his ambition became and the more difficult it was for his children to be part of his world.

Over the long summer of 2013, Chris returned to his hometown to help his widowed mother move out of his childhood home. As he began to examine his father’s manuscripts and memorabilia, journals, and letters, 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. Only in his father’s absence could he truly make sense of the man and his legacy.

In, Offutt takes us on the journey with him, reading his father’s prodigious literary output as both a critic and as a son seeking answers. This is a book about the life of a working writer who supports his family solely by the output of his typewriter; it’s about the awful psychic burdens one generation unthinkingly passes along to the next; and it’s about growing up in the Appalachian hills with a pack of fearless boys riding bicycles through the woods, happy and free.

From the critically acclaimed author of the collection and memoir is the finely crafted debut novel from a talent the calls “a fierce writer”.

Virgil Caudill has never gone looking for trouble, but this time he's got no choice — his hell-raising brother Boyd has been murdered. Everyone knows who did it, and in the hills of Kentucky, tradition won’t let a murder go unavenged. No matter which way he chooses, Virgil will lose.

The Good Brother

From the critically acclaimed author of the novel and memoir is Chris Offutt’s fiercely original short story collection calls “a magical book”.

Arriving seven years after Offutt’s debut collection , Out of the Woods returns a masterly writer to the form which garnered him not only critical praise but many prestigious awards. Offutt, who “draws landscape and constructs dialogue with the eyes and ears of a native son” is on strong home turf here, capturing those who have left the Kentucky hills and long to return. These nine stories of gravediggers and drifters, gamblers and truck drivers a long way from home, are tales so full of hard edges they can't help but tell some hard truths.

From the critically acclaimed author of the novel and memoir comes the unforgettable memoir . “If you haven’t read Chris Offutt, you’ve missed an accomplished and compelling writer” ().

In his fortieth year, Chris Offutt returns to his alma mater, Morehead State University, the only four-year school in the Kentucky hills. He envisions leading the modest life of a teacher and father. Yet present-day reality collides painfully with memory, leaving Offutt in the midst of an adventure he never imagined: the search for a home that no longer exists.

Interwoven with this bittersweet homecoming tale are the wartime stories of Offutt’s parents-in-law, Arthur and Irene. An unlikely friendship develops between the eighty-year-old Polish Jew and the forty-year-old Kentucky hillbilly as Arthur and Offutt share comfort in exile, reliving the past at a distance. With masterful prose, Offutt combines these disparate accounts to create a profound meditation on family, home, the Holocaust, and history.

From the critically acclaimed author of the novel and memoir is the second volume from an American literary star. “If you haven't read Chris Offutt, you've missed an accomplished and compelling writer” ().

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.