With Empire Falls Richard Russo cements his reputation as one of America’s most compelling and compassionate storytellers.
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. In Empire Falls Richard Russo delves deep into the blue-collar heart of America in a work that overflows with hilarity, heartache, and grace.

A literary event of the highest order, The Collected Stories of Richard Yates brings together Yates's peerless short fiction in a single volume for the first time.Richard Yates was acclaimed as one of the most powerful, compassionate, and technically accomplished writers of America's postwar generation, and his work has inspired such diverse talents as Richard Ford, Ann Beattie, André Dubus, Robert Stone, and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. This collection, as powerful as Yate's beloved Revolutionary Road, contains the stories of his classic works Eleven Kinds of Loneliness (a book The New York Times Book Review hailed as "the New York equivalent of Dubliners") and Liars in Love; it also features nine new stories, seven of which have never been published.Whether addressing the smothered desire of suburban housewives, the white-collar despair of Manhattan office workers, the grim humor that atts life on a tuberculosis ward, or the moments of terrified peace experienced by American soldiers in World War II, Yates examines every frayed corner of the American dream. His stories, as empathetic as they are unforgiving, are like no others in our nation's literature. Published with a moving introduction by the novelist Richard Russo, this collection will stand as its author's final masterpiece.

In this uproarious new novel, Richard Russo performs his characteristic high-wire walk between hilarity and heartbreak. Russo's protagonist is William Henry Devereaux, Jr., 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 master of the novel, short story, and memoir, the best-selling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Everybody’s Fool now gives us his very first collection of personal essays, ranging throughout writing and reading and living.
In these nine essays, Richard Russo provides insight into his life as a writer, teacher, friend, and reader. From a commencement speech he gave at Colby College, to the story of how an oddly placed toilet made him reevaluate the purpose of humor in art and life, to a comprehensive analysis of Mark Twain’s value, to his harrowing journey accompanying a dear friend as she pursued gender-reassignment surgery, The Destiny Thief reflects the broad interests and experiences of one of America’s most beloved authors. Warm, funny, wise, and poignant, the essays included here traverse Russo’s writing life, expanding our understanding of who he is and how his singular, incredibly generous mind works. An utter joy to read, they give deep insight into the creative process from the prospective of one of our greatest writers.

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.

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 one new problem to cope a long-estranged son who is in imminent danger of following in his father's footsteps. With its sly and uproarious humor and a heart that embraces humanity's follies as well as its triumphs, Nobody's Fool is storytelling at its most generous.