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Nobody's Fool
by Richard Russo

List Price: $13.00
Pages: 560
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0679753338
Publisher: Vintage

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Author Biography


Richard Russo grew up in Gloversville, New York, the small, mostly working-class town that has served as the prototype for his fictional Mohawk and North Bath. His parents were separated, and he recalls his father as a man who "lived a life of studied bad habits. I became of interest to him when I got old enough to follow him into the OTB and then into the bar and then into the pool hall, when I could be taken to the places he went and not interrupt the rhythm of his life."

With his father, Russo worked construction jobs during his vacations from the University of Arizona, where he received his B.A. He later went on to get a master's degree and had almost earned his Ph.D. in American literature when it occurred to him that he would rather write his own novels than analyze other people's. He is the author of three books, Mohawk, The Risk Pool, and Nobody's Fool, which has recently been made into a feature film starring Paul Newman and Bruce Willis. Richard Russo teaches writing at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. He lives there with his wife, Barbara, and their two daughters.

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Author Interview




Richard Russo, in his own words:


Q: Some critics have described the characters in your latest novel as losers. What would you say to them?

A: It depends on what you mean. Is their luck going to change? No. Are they going to become affluent? No. Are they educated and either worldly wise or wise in terms of self-knowledge? No. Are they going to make progress? Yes.

Q: Your fiction, like that of many Victorian writers, has a very definite sense of place. What role does place play in Nobody's Fool?

A: Place is inseparable from character. If I try to write books about people before I have a pretty good sense of the places, that's an indication that I don't know the characters as well as I need to. And it's crucial to have a sense of place as process. Sully going to Hattie's first, then the OTB, then the Horse; the rhythms of his life are inseparable from who he is and what he thinks of himself. That comes from some of the real loves of my life in terms of literature, Dickens first and foremost: how do we know Pip in Great Expectations except in terms of the forge, the blacksmith's shop, and the marsh?



© Copyright 2012 by Richard Russo. Reprinted with permission by Vintage. All rights reserved.

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