Amazon.com (ISBN 0684853760, Paperback)

Out of the Woods starts with one man leaving his Kentucky hollow and ends with another who realizes he can't return. In between, Chris Offutt's broke, lonely, or just plain down-on-their-luck characters find out exactly how difficult it is to go home again, and how equally difficult it is to stop wishing they could. The critically acclaimed author of The Good Brother (a novel), as well as a memoir and a previous collection of stories, Offutt writes with rare honesty, insight, and restraint. "Sometimes I don't think I've done anything to leave my mark in this world. I'm the kind of person the world leaves a mark on," admits the narrator of "Two-Eleven All Around." The same might be said of all Offutt's Appalachian transplants, from the small-town sheriff of "Melungeons," forever marked by the violence and beauty of his mountain upbringing, to the rootless ex-con of "Moscow, Idaho," who wonders "if he'd ever find a woman, a job he liked, or a town he wanted to stay in." These lives are rendered in prose stripped so bare it reads like poetry--and yet is not without its own flinty wit. Given his first glimpse of his brother-in-law's corpse, the protagonist of the title story allows as how "he didn't look dead, but Gerald didn't think he looked too good either. He looked like a man with a bad hangover that he might shake by dinner." These are characters who get inside your head and stories worth reading again and again. As spare and simple as a Shaker chair, Offutt's tales should prove every bit as enduring. --Mary Park