Anyone familiar with Richard Russo’s fiction will recognize Gloversville, New York.
This is where the author grew up, the son of an ambitious mother and
a second-fiddle father. As Gloversville slides into poverty and illness, Russo’s mother instills in him the dream of a world elsewhere…a dream that has informed Russo’s fiction ever since.
“ It didn’t take long for me to learn that novel writing was a line of work that suited my temperament and played to my strengths, such as they were. . . . I’d discovered how to turn obsession and what my grandmother used to call sheer cussedness [to] my advantage. The same qualities that over a lifetime had contracted my mother’s world had somehow expanded mine. How and by what mechanism? Dumb luck? Grace? I honestly have no idea.”
P u b l i s h e d b y A l f r e d A . K n o P f A A K n o P f . c o m
a v a i l a b l e i n p a p e r b a c k f r o m v i n t a g e b o o k s
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From Elsewhere: