Richard Russo

"A best-selling and beloved author, at the very top of his game, now returns to North Bath, in upstate New York, and the characters who made Nobody's Fool, his third novel, his first great success. The irresistible Sully, who in the intervening years has come by some unexpected good fortune, is now staring down a VA cardiologist's estimate that he only has a year or two left, and he's busy as hell keeping the news from the most important people in...

"In this pair of novellas and two stories, Russo's characters bear little similarity to the blue-collar citizens we're familiar with from most of his novels. In "Horseman," a tenured professor confronts a young plagiarist as well as her own weaknesses as the Thanksgiving holiday approaches--"And after that, who knew?" In "Intervention," a realtor facing an ominous medical prognosis finds himself in his father's shadow while he presses forward, or...

Griffin has been tooling around for nearly a year with his father's ashes in the trunk, but his mother is still very much alive, and not shy about calling on his cell phone. She does so as he drives down to Cape Cod, where he and his wife, Joy, will celebrate the marriage of their daughter Laura's best friend. But by the end of this perfectly lovely weekend, the past has so thoroughly swamped the present that the future suddenly hangs in the balance....

Mohawk, New York, is one of those small towns that lie almost entirely on the wrong side of the tracks. Its citizens, too, have fallen on hard times. Dallas Younger, a star athlete in high school, now drifts from tavern to poker game, losing money, and, inevitablym another set of false teeth. His ex-wife, Anne, is stuck in a losing battle with her mother over care of her sick father. And their son, Randall, is deliberately neglecting his school work...

"While the title novella of Dubus's Finding a Girl in America returns to the somewhat off-the-rails literary life of Hank Allison, the collection's opening story strikes a much darker tone: “Killings”-the basis of the Academy Award-nominated film In the Bedroom-is a swift tale of revenge that leaves readers wondering what they might do in the name of family love. Dubus's prowess with narrative compression is on full display in the story “Waiting”:...

To everyone's surprise, fifty-five years after the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee has published another novel. Go Set a Watchman was written before Lee's beloved masterpiece, as director Mary McDonagh Murphy explains in this update of her 2011 documentary Hey, Boo: Harper Lee & To Kill a Mockingbird. Murphy's film, Harper Lee: From Mockingbird to Watchman, sifts through the facts and speculation surrounding Lee and both her novels,...

Paul Newman earned an Oscar® nomination plus Best Actor honors from the National Society of Film Critics and New York Film Critics Circle for his portrayal of Sully, a likeable working stiff who's made a lifetime of bad decisions. But he unexpectedly has a chance to make right on some of them when his estranged son - and grandson - drop into his life. Melanie Griffith and Jessica Tandy are among the talented costars of this engaging film honored...