Richard Russo

Jack and Joy Griffin are back on Cape Cod - where they spent their hope-filled honeymoon - for a wedding. He's spent a lifetime trying to be happier than his parents, but has he succeeded? A year later, at a second wedding, Jack has a second urn in the car, and his life is starting to unravel.

Miles Roby har langet burgere over disken i Empire Grill i tyve år, og derfra kan han se ned ad hovedgaden i den engang så driftige industriby Empire Falls og fornemme byens puls, som nu slår meget langsomt. For Whiting-familien, der ejer fabrikkerne og det meste andet på egnen, har flyttet produktionen væk fra byen, og det har skruet livet i Empire Falls ned på vågeblus. Så det er bekymrede kunder, der letter deres hjerte over for Miles – som har sine helt egne problemer. Hans kone er faldet for ejeren af det lokale fitnesscenter og vil skilles, hans begavede datter og øjesten har store problemer med lærerne og de øvrige elever i skolen, og Francine Whiting, der ejer Empire Grill og ser ud til at tro, at ejerskabet også omfatter Miles, vil ikke lade ham modernisere stedet. Det har hun sine helt private og grumme grunde til, finder Miles efterhånden ud af. "EMPIRE FALLS er en stor nutidskrønike om et USA i forandring, og Richard Russo blev da også tildelt den prestigegivende Pulitzerpris for romanen. Russo er en af de bedste nutidige romanforfattere." THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

NATIONAL BESTSELLER - From the beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls comes "a magnificent, bighearted" novel (The Boston Globe) about small-town America that follows Louis Charles Lynch ("Lucy") and his wife of forty years as they prepare to embark on a vacation to Italy. Lucy is sixty years old and has spent his entire life in Thomaston, New York. Like his late, beloved father, Lucy is an optimist, though he's had plenty of reasons not to be--chief among them his mother, still indomitably alive. Yet it was her shrewdness, combined with that Lynch optimism, that had propelled them years ago to the right side of the tracks and created an "empire" of convenience stores about to be passed on to the next generation. Lucy's oldest friend, once a rival for his wife's affection, leads a life in Venice far removed from Thomaston. In fact, the exact nature of their friendship is one of the many mysteries Lucy hopes to untangle in the "history" he's writing of his hometown and family. And with his story interspersed with that of Noonan, the native son who'd fled so long ago, the destinies building up around both of them (and Sarah, too) are relentless, constantly surprising, and utterly revealing. Look for Richard Russo's new book, Somebody's Fool, coming soon.

He's a good man, but Louis Charles Lynch, known as Lucy, isn't always as reliable as he seems, and even he secretly longs for what he can't have. Now, at sixty years old, he and Sarah are about to travel to Venice, where Lucy's oldest friend and rival has traded life and family for a life far removed from Thomaston.

In his first collection of stories, Richard Russo focuses on a range of human behaviour. In the title story, a septuagenarian nun resolutely invades the narrator's college writing workshop with an incredible saga.

A first collection of short fiction by the author of Empire Falls explores the mysteries and complexities of human behavior and motivation in the lives of such characters as a jaded Hollywood filmmaker, a precocious fifth-grader watching his parents' marriage disintegrate, a child forced into a harrowing cross-country escape, and a septuagenarian nun. Reprint. 75,000 first printing.

A collection of nineteen short stories about baseball include contributions from Jim Shepard, Stuart Dybek, Owen King, Patricia Highsmith, Andre Dubus, Ray Gonzalez, and Floyd Skloot, among others. (Story Collection)

Miles Roby, a gentle, funny loser, runs the Empire Grill and hopes one day to own it. Meantime, though, his wife has run off with his worst customer, he's anxious about his adored teenage daughter and his one-handed brother, and his incorrigible father sponges off everyone.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER - PULITZER PRIZE WINNER - The bestselling author of Nobody's Fool and Straight Man delves deep into the blue-collar heart of America in a work that overflows with hilarity, heartache, and grace. "Rich, humorous ... Mr. Russo's most seductive book thus far." --The New York Times Welcome to Empire Falls, a blue-collar town full of abandoned mills whose citizens surround themselves with the comforts and feuds provided by lifelong friends and neighbors and who find humor and hope in the most unlikely places, in this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Richard Russo. Miles Roby has been slinging burgers at the Empire Grill for 20 years, a job that cost him his college education and much of his self-respect. What keeps him there? It could be his bright, sensitive daughter Tick, who needs all his help surviving the local high school. Or maybe it's Janine, Miles' soon-to-be ex-wife, who's taken up with a noxiously vain health-club proprietor. Or perhaps it's the imperious Francine Whiting, who owns everything in town-and seems to believe that "everything" includes Miles himself. Look for Richard Russo's new book, Somebody's Fool, coming soon.

Mohawk, New York, is one of those small towns that lie almost entirely on the wrong side of the tracks. And their son, Randall, is deliberately neglecting his schoolwork - because in a place like Mohawk it doesn't pay to be smart. Mohawk chronicles over a dozen lives in a decaying leather town in upstate New York.

The Risk Pool is a thirty-year journey through the lives of Sam Hall, a small-town gambling hellraiser, and his watchful, introspective son Ned.

Hank Devereaux, a fifty-year-old, one-time novelist now serving as temporary chair of the English department, has more than a mid-life crisis to contend with when he learns that he must cull 20 per cent of his department to meet budget.

Hilarious and true-to-life, witty, compassionate, and impossible to put down, Straight Man follows Hank Devereaux through one very bad week in this novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls. - Now the AMC Original Series Lucky Hank. William Henry Devereaux, Jr., is the reluctant chairman of the English department of a badly underfunded college in the Pennsylvania rust belt. Devereaux's reluctance is partly rooted in his character--he is a born anarchist--and partly in the fact that his department is more savagely divided than the Balkans. In the course of a single week, Devereaux will have his nose mangled by an angry colleague, imagine his wife is having an affair with his dean, wonder if a curvaceous adjunct is trying to seduce him with peach pits, and threaten to execute a goose on local television. All this while coming to terms with his philandering father, the dereliction of his youthful promise, and the ominous failure of certain vital body functions. In short, Straight Man is classic Russo--side-splitting, poignant, compassionate, and unforgettable. Look for Richard Russo's new book, Somebody's Fool, coming soon.

In his slyly funny and moving new novel, the author of The Risk Pool follows the unexpected operation of grace in a deadbeat, upstate New York town--and in the lives of the unluckiest of its citizens. Soon to be a major motion picture starring Paul Newman, Bruce Willis, Melanie Griffith, and Jessica Tandy. Author reading tour.

A wonderfully funny, perceptive novel The Risk Pool is set in Mohawk, New York, where Ned Hall is doing his best to grow up, even though neither of his estranged parents can properly be called adult. His father, Sam, cultivates bad habits so assiduously that he is stuck at the bottom of his auto insurance risk pool. His mother, Jenny, is slowly going crazy from resentment at a husband who refuses either to stay or to stay away. As Ned veers between allegiances to these grossly inadequate role models, Richard Russo gives us a book that overflows with outsized characters and outlandish predicaments and whose vision of family is at once irreverent and unexpectedly moving. In the traditions of Thornton Wilder and Anne Tyler, The Risk Pool was hailed by The New York Times as "...superbly original and maliciously funny. Russo proves himself a master at evoking the sights, feelings, and smells of a town."