The Risk Pool

The Risk Pool

Author: Richard Russo

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2011-11-09

Total Pages: 492

ISBN-13: 0307809935

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From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls comes a wonderfully funny novel set in Mohawk, New York, where Ned Hall is doing his best to grow up, even though neither of his estranged parents can properly be called adult. "Superbly original and maliciously funny." —The New York Times Book Review 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, Richard Russo gives us a book that overflows with outsized characters and outlandish predicaments and whose vision of family is at once irreverent and unexpectedly moving. Look for Richard Russo's new book, Somebody's Fool, coming soon.


Mohawk

Mohawk

Author: Richard Russo

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2011-11-09

Total Pages: 433

ISBN-13: 0307809846

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From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls comes a wonderfully written novel about a small town in New York whose citizens have fallen on hard times. "Immensely readable and sympathetic.... Mr. Russo has an instinctive gift for capturing the rhythms of small-town life." —The New York Times 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, losing money, and, inevitably, another set of false teeth. His ex-wife, Anne, is stuck in a losing battle with her mother over the care of her sick father. And their son, Randall, is deliberately neglecting his school work—because in a place like Mohawk it doesn't pay to be too smart. In Mohawk, Russo explores these lives with profound compassion and flint-hard wit. Out of derailed ambitions and old loves, secret hatreds and communal myths, he has created a richly plotted, densely populated, and wonderfully written novel that captures every nuance of America's backyard. Look for Richard Russo's new book, Somebody's Fool, coming soon.


Straight Man

Straight Man

Author: Richard Russo

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2011-11-09

Total Pages: 417

ISBN-13: 0307809943

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Hilarious and true-to-life, witty, compassionate, and impossible to put down, Straight Man follows Hank Devereaux through one very bad week in this novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls. • Now the AMC Original Series Lucky Hank. 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, poignant, compassionate, and unforgettable. Look for Richard Russo's new book, Somebody's Fool, coming soon.


Bridge of Sighs

Bridge of Sighs

Author: Richard Russo

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2007-09-25

Total Pages: 546

ISBN-13: 0307267903

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NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls comes "a magnificent, bighearted” novel (The Boston Globe) about small-town America that follows Louis Charles Lynch (“Lucy”) and his wife of forty years as they prepare to embark on a vacation to Italy. Lucy is sixty years old and has spent his entire life in Thomaston, New York. Like his late, beloved father, Lucy is an optimist, though he’s had plenty of reasons not to be—chief among them his mother, still indomitably alive. Yet it was her shrewdness, combined with that Lynch optimism, that had propelled them years ago to the right side of the tracks and created an “empire” of convenience stores about to be passed on to the next generation. Lucy's oldest friend, once a rival for his wife's affection, leads a life in Venice far removed from Thomaston. In fact, the exact nature of their friendship is one of the many mysteries Lucy hopes to untangle in the “history” he’s writing of his hometown and family. And with his story interspersed with that of Noonan, the native son who’d fled so long ago, the destinies building up around both of them (and Sarah, too) are relentless, constantly surprising, and utterly revealing. Look for Richard Russo's new book, Somebody's Fool, coming soon.


Empire Falls

Empire Falls

Author: Richard Russo

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2011-11-09

Total Pages: 498

ISBN-13: 0307809889

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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 mills whose citizens surround themselves with the comforts and feuds provided by lifelong friends and neighbors and who find humor and hope in the most unlikely places, in this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Richard Russo. 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. Look for Richard Russo's new book, Somebody's Fool, coming soon.


Chances Are . . .

Chances Are . . .

Author: Richard Russo

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2019-07-30

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 1101947756

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“[Russo’s] first novel in ten years hits the ball out of the park. . . . You’ll lap up this gripping, wise, and wonderful summer treat.” —The Boston Globe “A cascade of charm. . . . Russo is an undeniably endearing writer, and chances are this story will draw you back to the most consequential moments in your own life.”—The Washington Post One beautiful September day, three men in their late sixties convene on Martha's Vineyard, friends ever since meeting in college in the sixties. They couldn't have been more different then, or even today—Lincoln's a commercial real estate broker, Teddy a tiny-press publisher, and Mickey is a musician beyond his rockin' age. But each man holds his own secrets, in addition to the monumental mystery that none of them has ever stopped puzzling over since a Memorial Day weekend right here on the Vineyard in 1971. Now, forty-five years later, three lives and that of a significant other are put on displaywhile the distant past confounds the present ina relentless squall of surprise and discovery. Shot through with Russo's trademark comedy and humanity, Chances Are . . . introduces a new level of suspense and menace that will quicken the reader's heartbeat throughout this absorbing saga.


Trajectory

Trajectory

Author: Richard Russo

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2017-05-02

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 110194773X

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This dazzling collection of four stories features characters bound together by their parallel moments of reckoning with their pasts—and proves the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls is also a master of the short story. “Beautiful…. Will abruptly break your heart.” —The New York Times The characters in these four expansive stories are a departure from the blue-collar denizens that populate so many of Richard Russo’s novels. In “Horseman,” a young professor confronts an undergraduate plagiarist—as well as her own regrets. In “Intervention,” a realtor facing a serious medical prognosis finds himself in his late father’s shadow. “Voice” gives us a semiretired academic who is conned by his estranged brother into joining a group tour of the Venice Biennale. And “Milton and Marcus” takes us into a lapsed novelist’s attempt to rekindle his screenwriting career—a career that depends wholly, at a crucial moment, on two Hollywood icons (one living, one dead). Look for Richard Russo's new book, Somebody's Fool, coming soon.


Nobody's Fool

Nobody's Fool

Author: Richard Russo

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2011-11-09

Total Pages: 561

ISBN-13: 0307809927

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From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Empire Falls, this slyly funny, moving novel about a blue-collar town in upstate New York—and about Sully, one of its unluckiest citizens, who has been doing the wrong thing triumphantly for fifty years—is a classic American story. "Remarkable.... A revelation of the human heart." —The Washington Post 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 with: a long-estranged son who is in imminent danger of following in his father's footsteps. With its uproarious humor and a heart that embraces humanity's follies as well as its triumphs, Nobody's Fool, from Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Richard Russo, is storytelling at its most generous. Nobody’s Fool was made into a movie starring Paul Newman, Bruce Willis, Jessica Tandy, and Melody Griffith. Look for Everybody’s Fool, available now, and Somebody’s Fool, coming soon.


Dark Pools

Dark Pools

Author: Scott Patterson

Publisher: Crown Currency

Published: 2012-06-12

Total Pages: 386

ISBN-13: 0307887197

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A news-breaking account of the global stock market's subterranean battles, Dark Pools portrays the rise of the "bots"--artificially intelligent systems that execute trades in milliseconds and use the cover of darkness to out-maneuver the humans who've created them. In the beginning was Josh Levine, an idealistic programming genius who dreamed of wresting control of the market from the big exchanges that, again and again, gave the giant institutions an advantage over the little guy. Levine created a computerized trading hub named Island where small traders swapped stocks, and over time his invention morphed into a global electronic stock market that sent trillions in capital through a vast jungle of fiber-optic cables. By then, the market that Levine had sought to fix had turned upside down, birthing secretive exchanges called dark pools and a new species of trading machines that could think, and that seemed, ominously, to be slipping the control of their human masters. Dark Pools is the fascinating story of how global markets have been hijacked by trading robots--many so self-directed that humans can't predict what they'll do next.