No Heroes
A Memoir of Coming Home
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Following his 1993 memoir, The Same River Twice, readers and critics clamored for Offutt to recapture that success with a similar book. It's now been achieved. Offutt turns his impressive storytelling skills and unerring eye for detail on his journey back to the Kentucky hills, a seminal voyage in his 40th year to revisit his birthplace. He uses his considerable talents as a writer of short fiction to flesh out the colorful characters who populate the small community of Rowan County, recounting the quirky social and cultural rituals that distinguish it. "Never again will you have to fight people's attempts to make you feel ashamed of where you grew up. You are no longer from somewhere. Here is where you are. This is home. This dirt is yours," Offutt writes. Once he lands a teaching job at Morehead State University, which he graduated from 20 years earlier, his homesickness for big cities dissipates and he's no longer seen as an outsider. With his wife and children, Offutt struggles to move past tarnished childhood memories to forge a new life, savoring familiar places and faces while attempting to create a new identity as husband, father and mentor to his students. The book's high points are the painful yet eloquent recollections of his wife's parents Holocaust survivors who define the meaning of the words "heroes" and "home." Offutt's bold refusal to submit to nostalgic sentimentality, even as he admits defeat and forsakes his search for "home," and his skill as prose stylist set this book apart from the many homecoming memoirs.
