{"id":45613,"date":"2018-04-04T19:40:06","date_gmt":"2018-04-05T01:40:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/?p=45613"},"modified":"2018-04-04T19:41:21","modified_gmt":"2018-04-05T01:41:21","slug":"chris-offutt-with-country-dark-at-off-square-books-on-wednesday-april-11","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/chris-offutt-with-country-dark-at-off-square-books-on-wednesday-april-11\/","title":{"rendered":"Chris Offutt With Country Dark at Off Square Books on Wednesday, April 11"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Chris Offutt<\/strong> is the author of the short-story collections Kentucky Straight<\/em> and Out of the <\/em><\/span>Woods<\/em>, the novel The Good <\/em><\/span>Brother,<\/em> and three memoirs: The Same River <\/em><\/span>Twice, No <\/span>Heroes<\/em>, and My Father, the <\/em><\/span>Pornographer<\/em>. His work has appeared in Best American Short Stories<\/strong> and\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"Best American <\/strong><\/span>Essays<\/strong>, among many other places. He has written screenplays for <\/span>Weeds<\/em>, True <\/span>Blood<\/em>, and <\/span>Treme<\/em>, and has received fellowships from the Lannan and Guggenheim foundations<\/strong>.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Chris Offutt\u2019s long-awaited return to fiction after nearly two decades, Country Dark<\/em> is a fierce noir-inflected novel about a good man pushed by circumstance into crime.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Chris Offutt is an outstanding literary talent, whose work has been called \u201clean and brilliant\u201d ( New York Times Book Review<\/em> ) and compared by reviewers to Tobias Wolff, Ernest<\/span> Hemingway<\/em>, and Raymond Carver<\/em>. He\u2019s been awarded the Whiting Writers Award for Fiction\/Nonfiction<\/strong> and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Fiction Award<\/strong>, 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\u00a0Korean War to 1970.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Tucker, a young veteran, returns from war to work for a bootlegger. He falls in love and starts a family, and while the Tuckers don\u2019t have much, they have the love of their home and each other. But when his family is threatened, Tucker is pushed into violence, which changes everything. The story of people living off the land and by their wits in a backwoods Kentucky world of shine-runners and laborers whose social codes are every bit as nuanced as the\u00a0British aristocracy, ( Country Dark is a novel that blends the best of Larry Brown and James M. Cain, with a noose tightening evermore around a man who just wants to protect those he loves. It reintroduces the vital and absolutely distinct voice of Chris Offutt, a voice we\u2019ve been missing for years.<\/span>\u00a0\"The<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chris Offutt is the author of the short-story collections Kentucky Straight and Out of the Woods, the novel<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":261,"featured_media":45615,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2239],"tags":[12119,12112,12113,12106,12116,12108,12110,12114,12109,12117,12107,12111,12115,12118],"class_list":["post-45613","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local-literary-events","tag-american-academy-of-arts-and-letters-fiction-award","tag-best-american-essays","tag-best-american-short-stories","tag-chris-offutt","tag-ernest-hemingway","tag-kentucky-straight","tag-my-father","tag-new-york-times-book-review","tag-out-of-the-woods","tag-raymond-carver","tag-the-good-brother","tag-the-pornographer","tag-tobias-wolff","tag-whiting-writers-award-for-fiction-nonfiction"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/chris-offuttfeat.jpg?fit=620%2C349&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45613","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/261"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45613"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45613\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45615"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45613"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45613"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45613"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}