No Heroes: A Memoir of Coming Home

· Simon and Schuster
Ebook
272
Pages
Eligible
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About this ebook

From the critically acclaimed author of the novel The Good Brother and memoir My Father the Pornographer comes the unforgettable memoir No Heroes. “If you haven’t read Chris Offutt, you’ve missed an accomplished and compelling writer” (Chicago Tribune).

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 No Heroes, a profound meditation on family, home, the Holocaust, and history.

About the author

Chris Offutt grew up in Haldeman, Kentucky, a former mining town of two-hundred people in the Daniel Boone National Forest. He is the author of two memoirs: The Same River Twice and No Heroes; two collections of short stories: Kentucky Straight and Out of the Woods; and one novel, The Good Brother. He has published over eighty stories and essays, including appearances in The New York Times, Esquire, GQ, Playboy, and on National Public Radio. His work is in many textbooks and anthologies such as Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays.
His work received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the NEA, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The international magazine Granta included him in its list of the “Top 20 Young American Writers.” He wrote and produced screenplays for True Blood, Weeds, and Treme, and TV pilots for Fox, Lions Gate, and CBS. A graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop, he lives in rural Lafayette County near Oxford, Mississippi.

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