New York, NY: Simon and Schuster (1992)

First Edition. Signed.

Near fine in dust jacket.


Chris Offutt has the rare good luck of having - already, at thirty-four - a life worth writing about and the ability to tell it. At the age of nineteen, he'd been rejected by the army, the Peace Corps, the park rangers, and police. He and his father "hadn't spoken civilly in upwards of thirty-eight months." Offutt left the Kentucky Appalachians where he'd grown up and thumbed his way north.

Manhattan turned out to be the first stop on a singularly bumpy journey into manhood that took him through the underbelly of the nation. His trek included a gig as a walrus in a traveling circus, a mosquito-ridden stint as a nature guide in an Everglades swamp, and encounters with evangelists, survivalists, and other figures indigenous to the American landscape.

Offutt not only lived to tell the tale but grew into a writer of surpassing skill, making his much-praised debut with the fiction collection Kentucky Straight in 1992. The Same River Twice is Offutt's bold back flip into the muddy waters of past experience. From the banks of the Iowa River where he eventually came to rest, he casts a lingering glance at a youth "not misspent exactly, but squandered to a certain extent," as he tracks the course of his wife's pregnancy and awaits the birth of his first child.