Sneak Preview of THE MAN, THE MYTH, THE LEGEND

My new short sto­ry col­lec­tion, The Man, The Myth, The Leg­end, will be released in less than a week, but I want­ed to give read­ers a sneak pre­view of the col­lec­tion’s con­tent, hope­ful­ly piquing peo­ple’s inter­est in the book before it appears.

A col­lec­tion of enter­tain­ing and unique sto­ries about 10 men, The Man, The Myth, The Leg­end explores the idea that while men may come from very dif­fer­ent walks of life, at root they are more alike than they seem, grap­pling with the same issues and fac­ing the same dilem­mas: love, lust, adul­tery, greed, pride, ambi­tion, revenge, death, and a desire for their lives to mean some­thing.
 
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From the emo­tion­al­ly poignant to the out­ra­geous­ly humor­ous, these sto­ries dra­ma­tize the lives of a wide range of fas­ci­nat­ing men:

•  African big-game hunter
•  Writer and bond sales­man
•  Homi­ci­dal vio­lin­ist
•  Road sign “engi­neer”
•  Boot­leg­ger
•  Glob­al grain explor­er
•  Cor­po­rate speech­writer
•  Pro­fes­sion­al dog­catch­er
•  Fine arts painter
•  Civ­il War gen­er­al

In the award-win­ning sto­ry “The Boot­leg­ger,” an ordi­nary man goes to extra­or­di­nary lengths to pro­vide for his fam­i­ly dur­ing the Great Depres­sion. In “The Blonde Imper­a­tive,” a mod­ern man con­tends with some­thing all men have since the begin­ning of time—gut-wrenching temp­ta­tion. And in “The Lost Dis­patch­es of Gen­er­al George B. McClel­lan,” an infa­mous Civ­il War gen­er­al reveals the piti­ful but hilar­i­ous depths of his own self-decep­tion.

Brim­ming with action-adven­ture, ample humor, and clean, pic­turesque writ­ing, The Man, The Myth, The Leg­end com­bines the com­pelling nar­ra­tive dri­ve of great movies (“What hap­pens next?”) with the gem­like beau­ty of the short sto­ry form.

The col­lec­tion con­tains the fol­low­ing sto­ries (in quotes) and addi­tion­al con­tent:

•  “The Last Great White Hunter”
•  “The Mag­nif­i­cent Mur­phy”
•  “Sonata for Knife & Vio­lin in D♭ Major; Op. 1 ‘Revenge’”
•  “The Man Behind the Signs”
•  “The Boot­leg­ger”
•  “Sev­en Whole Grains on a Mis­sion™”
•  “The Blonde Imper­a­tive”
•  “The Dog­catch­er”
•  “The Charmed Life and Sin­gu­lar Death of Jacob Homer Stan­ley”
•  Bonus Sto­ry (down­load­able PDF): “The Lost Dis­patch­es of Gen­er­al George B. McClel­lan”
•  A Note from the Author
•  About the Author
•  Excerpt from A Real Piece of Work

 

* The Man, The Myth, The Leg­end (MML) will be avail­able for Kin­dle, NOOK, and Kin­dle- and NOOK-enabled devices on Fri­day, July 12. Look for links to the books on this site, my Twit­ter page, and my Face­book page.

 

** The bril­liant MML book cov­er design is by Elis­a­beth Pinio. The stu­pen­dous pho­to­graph on the cov­er, “315/365 — The 365 Toy Project,” is by David D. (a.k.a. puuik­ibeach) on Flickr. My heart­felt thanks go out to both of them.

 

By Chris Orcutt

CHRIS ORCUTT is an American novelist and fiction writer with over 30 years' writing experience and more than a dozen books in his oeuvre. Since 2015, Chris been working exclusively on his magnum opus. Bodaciously True & Totally Awesome: The Legendary Adventures of Avery “Ace” Craig is a 9-episode novel about teens in the 1980s. It’s about ’80s teens, but for adults (in other words, it’s decidedly not YA literature), and he’s applied this epic storytelling approach to the least examined, most misunderstood, most marginalized narrative space in American literature: the lives and inner worlds of teenagers.

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