I have been having a bad stream of luck with books lately. Borrowed the audio book from my coworker thinking it would be another great Richard Russo book (Empire Falls is amazing!).... but man was I wrong. This book is full of nothing but an adult man complaining about his great life, carrying on...
Just the introduction about Isaac Bashevis Singer is worth the price of the book. One way or another I enjoyed all twenty stories, but my least favorites were McSweeney's futuristic experimental stories, which both started off promising but went on too long and fell flat at certain crucial points...
I only read 9 stories. I started a few others, but couldn't get into them at the time. Perhaps I'll revisit some stories later. My ratings for the stories I read in full:Donkey Greedy, Donkey Gets Punched by Steve Almond: 3The Cousins by Charles Baxter: 2Safari by Jennifer Egan: 4Someone Ought to...
Generally I have liked all Richard Russo books. This is a short story or what Amazon calls a Kindle Single. It is interesting to see how Russo approaches a shorter story. I read a lot of short stories. They have to build rapidly. This short story or Novella does not. From the beginning it f...
At first I found this book merely "funny" -- in an ongoing-chuckle (rather than laugh-out-loud) sort of way. Naturally it reminded me of my own 6 years as a grad student/adjunct professor in English departments, with perhaps even more backbiting than we graduate students were aware of. It seemed ...
Richard Russo is often praised for his ability to capture the typical blue-collar town on paper, “to chronicle with insight and compassion the day-to-day life of small town America.” (Houston Chronicle) He does this in Nobody’s Fool by masterfully manipulating points of view to depict/expose his...
Това е книга за житейския избор и умението, или липсата на такова, да се справяме с последиците. Сцената е западащо американско градче, притежавано и манипулирано от една единствена фамилия, героите - любопитен калейдоскоп от архетипове. По стечение на обстоятелствата, които бавно излизат на повъ...
I write these book reviews to remind myself what the book was about. Without these little reports, the book would be gone from my mind within minutes. I did not write this review in a timely fashion, so guess what? I resort to plagiarism to recall the story. After I get the basics down, I wil...
Richard Russo, once a teacher of writing himself, opens his debut collection of short stories, The Whore’s Child, in familiar territory: the classroom. Sister Ursula, who is “nearly as big as a linebacker,” deposits herself in the narrator’s advanced writing workshop, uninvited and unregistered. ...
Six years after the best-selling, Pulitzer Prize–winning Empire Falls, Richard Russo returns with a novel that expands even further his widely heralded achievement.Louis Charles (“Lucy”) Lynch has spent all his sixty years in upstate Thomaston, New York, married to the same woman, Sarah, for fort...
So this is my third or fourth Russo and not my favorite. It did not surprise me to discover that it is his first novel, as some pieces were too overt and convenient for my liking.This novel again deals with the politics and relationships in a small northeastern town (this time in New York). There...
When I woke, I thought I was still in my cell. The room was dark, and as I sat up I became confused, sensing something vaguely unfamiliar about my surroundings. I stumbled out of bed—its height was not the same as the bunk in my cell—and bumped into a wall where one shouldn’t have been. Yet some ...
Since it was on Forest Avenue, a block from our house, I’d seen Sister Ursula many times before the night she turned up in class, but we never had spoken. She drove a rusted-out station wagon that was always crowded with elderly nuns who needed assistance getting in and out. Though St. Francis Ch...