Bridge of Sighs

York, his entire life. Lucy’s oldest friend, once a rival for his wife’s affection, leads a life in Venice far from Thomaston. Lucy writes the story of his town, his family, and his own life, interspersed with that of the native son who left so long ago and never looked back.
    Fiction/Literature
     
    MOHAWK
     
    Mohawk, New York, is one of those small towns that lie almost entirely on the wrong side of the tracks. Dallas Younger, a star athlete in high school, now drifts from tavern to poker game, while his ex-wife, Anne, is stuck in a losing battle with her moth-er over the care of her sick father. Richard Russo explores these lives with profound compassion and flint-hard wit.
    Fiction/Literature
     
    NOBODY’S FOOL
     
    Nobody’s Fool
follows the unexpected operation of grace in the life of an unlucky man, Sully, who has been triumphantly doing the wrong thing for fifty years. Divorced and carrying on with another man’s wife, saddled with a bum knee and friends who make enemies redundant, Sully now has a new problem: a son who is in danger of following in his father’s footsteps. With humor and a heart that embraces humanity’s follies, this is storytelling at its most generous.
    Fiction/Literature
     
    THE RISK POOL
     
    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, Russo gives us a book that overflows with outsized characters and outlandish predicaments.
    Fiction/Literature
     
    STRAIGHT MAN
     
    William Henry Devereaux, Jr., is the reluctant chair of the English department at an underfunded college in the Pennsylvania rust belt. In the course of a week, Devereaux will have his nose mangled by an angry colleague, imagine his wife is having an affair with the dean, wonder if an adjunct is trying to seduce him with peach pits, and threaten to execute a goose on local television. At the same time, he must come to terms with the dereliction of his youthful promise and the ominous failure of certain vital body functions. In short,
Straight Man
is classic Russo—side-splitting, true-to-life, and impossible to put down.
    Fiction/Literature
     
    THAT OLD CAPE MAGIC
     
    It’s a perfectly lovely wedding weekend on the Cape, but for Griffin, the middle-aged father of the bride, it marks the beginning of his descent into a failed marriage, a confrontation with his parents’ deaths, and the realization that his life does not measure up to the life he thought he wanted. With moments of great comedy alternating with ones of rueful understanding,
That Old Cape Magic
is unlike anything Richard Russo has ever written.
    Fiction/Literature
     
    THE WHORE’S CHILD
     
    To this irresistible debut collection of short stories, Richard Russo brings the same bittersweet wit, deep knowledge of human nature, and spellbinding narrative gifts that distinguish his best-selling novels. A cynical Hollywood moviemaker confronts his dead wife’s lover and abruptly realizes the depth of his own passion. As his parents’ marriage disintegrates, a precocious fifth-grader distracts himself with meditations on baseball, spaghetti, and his place in the universe. And in the title story, an elderly nun enters a college creative writing class and plays havoc with its tidy notions of fact and fiction.
    Fiction/Short Stories
     
    VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES
Available at your local bookstore, or visit
www.randomhouse.com
     

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

    Copyright © 2007 by Richard Russo

    All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
    www.aaknopf.com
    Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

    Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
    Alfred A. Knopf: Excerpt from “Hope [2]” from
The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes,
edited by Arnold Rampersad with David Roessel, Associate Editor, copyright © 1994 by The Estate of Langston Hughes. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
    Farrar,