Richard Russo

Miles Roby tries to hold his family together while working at the Empire Grill in the once-successful logging town of Empire Falls while dealing with the imperious Mrs. Whiting, the heir to a faded logging and textile legacy, in this evocative novel by the author of Nobody's Fool. Reader's Guide available. Reprint. 150,000 first printing.

Empire Falls

A Novel

Straight Man

Nobody's fool

Bridge of Sighs

Risk Pool

That old cape magic

Stories

The Whore's Child

O Declínio do Império Whiting

Nate in Venice

a novella & three stories

Interventions

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 and true-to-life, witty, compassionate, and impossible to put down.

"A best-selling and beloved author, at the very top of his game, now returns to North Bath, in upstate New York, and the characters who made Nobody's Fool, his third novel, his first great success. The irresistible Sully, who in the intervening years has come by some unexpected good fortune, is now staring down a VA cardiologist's estimate that he only has a year or two left, and he's busy as hell keeping the news from the most important people in his life: Ruth, the married woman he carried on with for years ... the ultra-hapless Rub Squeers, who worries that he and Sully aren't still best friends. Sully's son and grandson, for whom he was mostly an absentee figure. Doug Raymer, now Chief of Police and still obsessing over the identity of the man his wife might have been having an affair with before she died in a freak accident. Bath's mayor, the former academic Gus Moynihan, who also has a pressing wife problems and then there's Carl Roebuck, whose lifelong run of failing upwards might now come to ruin. Everybody's Fool is filled with humor, heart, hard times, and characters who you can't help but love for all their faults. It is classic Russo and a crowning achievement from one of the greatest storytellers of our time"--

Everybody's Fool

Richard Russo

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