Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:
A marvelous new essay collection from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Somebody's Fool and The Destiny Thief
Life and Art --these are the twin subjects considered in Richard Russo's twelve masterful new essays--how they inform each other and how the stories we tell ourselves about both shape our understanding of the world around us.
In "The Lives of Others," he reflects on the implacable fact that writers use people, insisting that what matters, in the end, is how and for what purpose. How do you bridge the gap between what you know and what you don't, and sometimes can't, know? Why tell a story in the first place? What we don't understand, Russo opines, is in fact the very thing that beckons to us. In "Stiff Neck," he writes of the exasperating fault lines exposed within his own family as his wife's sister and her husband--proudly unvaccinated--develop COVID. In "Triage," he details with heartbreaking vividness the terror of seeing his seven-year-old grandson in critical condition. And in "Ghosts," he revisits Gloversville, the town that gave rise to the now-legendary fictional town of North Bath, and confronts the specter of its richly populated past and its ghostly present.
Sharp, tender, extraordinarily intimate reflections on work, culture, love, and family from one of the great writers of our time.
"Sharp, tender, extraordinarily intimate reflections on work, culture, love and family from the Pulitzer Prize winning author of SOMEBODY'S FOOL and THE DESTINY THIEF"-- Provided by publisher.
Reviews provided by Syndetics
Publishers Weekly Review
These stimulating pieces from Pulitzer Prize--winning novelist Russo (Somebody's Fool) explore his artistic process and upbringing in a blue-collar town in upstate New York. In "The Lives of Others," Russo sensitively probes the ethics of writing fiction from the perspective of characters who belong to different identity groups than the author, suggesting that while such novelists as Rebecca Makkai have done so successfully, writers should be careful not to succumb to opportunism and to take seriously the moral responsibility of writing about marginalized groups. "From Lucky Jim to Lucky Hank" provides an insider's view of the book to screen adaptation process, recounting how Russo modeled his 1997 novel, Straight Man, on Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim, and how The Office showrunner Paul Lieberstein updated Russo's portrayal of middle-aged ennui for the 2023 series Lucky Hank. Russo's skill as a storyteller is on full display throughout, but the impact of the autobiographical essays is dulled by repetition. For instance, "Marriage Story" and "What We Really Want from Stories" read like successive drafts of the same piece, both using Russo's mother's oversimplified explanation of her reasons for separating from his father as a springboard to investigate the contradictory power of stories to alternatively reveal or dissemble. Still, Russo's fans will savor this. Agent: Nat Sobel, Sobel Weber Assoc. (May)
Booklist Review
As he has done in the past, Russo returns to the personal essay to reflect on subjects of eternal fascination to himself and to his audience. The stuff of everyday life has proven richly inspirational throughout Russo's award-winning fiction, as careful readers of his beloved North Bath trilogy of novels can attest. His career, not only as a novelist, screenwriter, and memoirist, but also as a university professor, is brought into keen focus as he poses and answers essential questions regarding approach, point of view, and the permission structure behind storytelling. Russo may no longer live in the small upstate New York mill town that animated the setting for many of his novels, and the parents, grandparents, and townspeople who raised and nurtured him there may no longer be alive, but their collective impact remains a source of inquiry and mystification. Unsettled though many issues may be, Russo's commonsense resolution to these enduring episodes elevates the individuality of his response to a reassuring level of universality.
Kirkus Book Review
Musings on the author's past, his life as a writer, and recent cultural topics. Russo has done outstanding and widely acclaimed work in fiction (Empire Falls,Straight Man, the North Bath Trilogy) and has also written a strong memoir (Elsewhere), so a collection of personal essays written over the past several years sounds like a perfectly reasonable idea. But it would take a slightly different set of essays and more scrupulous pruning to produce the version of that book a devoted admirer might imagine. Not much of interest is left to say about the Covid-19 pandemic, and Russo says some of it more than once. "There was simply no definition ofessential worker broad enough to include a seventy-one-year-old novelist," he posits early on, noting in a later essay that "it's hard to argue that writers are essential workers." The notion that "writers use people," far from fresh and seemingly owned by Joan Didion, comes up in "Triage" and in later essays is deemed "probably worth saying again," twice. Is it really the right time for an essay framed around "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid?" Which of Russo's parents was right about America? This is one of the themes of a long essay, "Marriage Story," that contains memoir material familiar to the author's many fans, and much of it is reprised in a thematically adjacent essay titled "Ghosts." On the other hand, those same readers are likely to enjoy Russo's observations about the genesis of his story "The Whore's Child" in "The Lives of Others," his take on the fraught question of whether we must only write what we know. As he explains, he felt closer to, and prouder of, his octogenarian nun character than to his seemingly more autobiographical middle-aged writer--and breaks down exactly why and how. Russo is quite a bit better than this collection would suggest, but completists will forgive him. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
TextPublisher: New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2025Edition: First editionDescription: pages cmContent type: