Richard Russo

Griffin has been tooling around for nearly a year with his father's ashes in the trunk, but his mother is still very much alive, and not shy about calling on his cell phone. She does so as he drives down to Cape Cod, where he and his wife, Joy, will celebrate the marriage of their daughter Laura's best friend. But by the end of this perfectly lovely weekend, the past has so thoroughly swamped the present that the future suddenly hangs in the balance....

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...

"From the Pulitzer Prize-winning Richard Russo--in his first stand-alone novel in a decade--comes a new revelation: a gripping story about the abiding yet complex power of friendship. One beautiful September day, three sixty-six-year old men convene on Martha's Vineyard, friends ever since meeting in college circa the sixties. They couldn't have been more different then, or even today--Lincoln's a commercial real estate broker, Teddy a tiny-press...

Richard Russo's slyly funny and moving novel follows the unexpected operation of grace in a deadbeat town in upstate New York - and in the life of one of its unluckiest citizens, Sully, who has been doing the wrong thing triumphantly for fifty years ... Divorced from his own wife and carrying on halfheartedly with another man's, saddled with a bum knee and friends who make enemies redundant, Sully now has a new problem to cope with: a long-estranged...

"In this pair of novellas and two stories, Russo's characters bear little similarity to the blue-collar citizens we're familiar with from most of his novels. In "Horseman," a tenured professor confronts a young plagiarist as well as her own weaknesses as the Thanksgiving holiday approaches--"And after that, who knew?" In "Intervention," a realtor facing an ominous medical prognosis finds himself in his father's shadow while he presses forward, or...

For two decades Ned is shuttled back and forth between his mother, Jenny, and his father, Sam, after Sam abandoned them and now Ned struggles to win his father's affection while avoiding his sins.

A provocative, unprecedented anthology featuring original short stories on what it means to be an American from thirty bestselling and award-winning authors with an introduction by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen: "This chorus of brilliant voices articulating the shape and texture of contemporary America makes for necessary reading" (Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies).
When Donald Trump claimed victory...

A powerful portrait of blue-collar America, a timeless tribute to the inherent decency and good humor that sustains working-class people in everyday life.

An absent-minded vicar of a rural parish is so distracted by the pressures of his job that he fails to notice his wife's dalliance with her brash golf instructor, his daughter's parade of new boyfriends, and his young son's regular trouncing by the school's bullies. Enter their new housekeeper, Grace, the answer to the family's prayers. Grace is a sweet old lady with her own distinctive definition of cleaning house, with an unusual way of solving...

It's Christmas Eve in icebound Wichita, Kansas, and this year Charlie Arglist just might have something to celebrate. Charlie is an attorney for the sleazy businesses of Wichita, along with his unsavory associate, the steely Vic Cavanaugh, the two have just successfully embezzled $2 million from Kansas City boss Bill Guerrard. But the real prize for Charlie is the stunning Renata, who runs the Sweet Cage strip club. Charlie hopes to slip out of town...