WESTPORT, Connecticut — Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Russo, the critically revered and publicly adored author of Nobody’s Fool, Empire Falls, Bridge of Sighs, and additional award-winning best-sellers, will be making a special appearance at The Westport Library on Monday, June 2, at 7 pm to discuss his newest book of essays, Life and Art.
Russo will be in conversation with Suzanne Leopold, the creator of SuzyApproved.com, a platform for Leopold’s book reviews, and SuzyApprovedBookTours.com, where she aggregates her community of bloggers across social media platforms to support authors with book launches.
Tickets for Russo’s appearance are $28 and include a copy of Life and Art. Click here to buy tickets; you can purchase either one or two seats plus a copy of Life and Art for the $28 cost.
Russo is the author of nine novels, most recently Somebody's Fool, Chances Are…, Everybody’s Fool, and That Old Cape Magic. He has also written two collections of short stories and a memoir, Elsewhere. He is perhaps best known for his trilogy of novels set in the fictional town of North Bath:Nobody’s Fool (1993), Everybody’s Fool (2016), and Somebody’s Fool (2023). Nobody’s Fool was made into a film starring Westport’s own Paul Newman along with Buce Willis, Jessica Tandy, and Melody Griffith.
“Nobody does small-town life better than Richard Russo,” said The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in a review, with The New York Times Book Review noting that “Russo is one of the best novelists around.”
In 2002, Russo received the Pulitzer Prize for Empire Falls, which, like Nobody’s Fool, won multiple awards for its screen adaptation. And in 2023 his novel Straight Man was adapted into the television series Lucky Hank starring Bob Odenkirk. Russo also received France’s Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine in 2017.
Life and Art is a collection of 12 essays that reflect on life, art, how they inform each other, and how the stories we tell ourselves about both shape our understanding of the world around us. In “The Lives of Others,” he considers the fact that writers use people, insisting that what matters, in the end, is how and for what purpose. In “Stiff Neck,” he writes of the fault lines exposed within his own family as his wife’s sister and her husband develop COVID. In “Triage,” he details the terror of seeing his 7-year-old grandson in critical condition. And in “Ghosts,” he revisits Gloversville, the town that gave rise to the fictional North Bath of his novels, and confronts the specter of its richly populated past and its ghostly present.
“Russo’s fans will savor this,” said Publishers Weekly.Leopold is an active book reviewer and promoter of authors. SuzyApproved.com has more than 10,000 followers on Twitter, and Leopold also posts regularly to Facebook and Instagram. A 20-year Westport resident, she served as a juror for the 2024 Westport Prize for Literature.
Author Talk: Pulitzer Prize-winning Author Richard Russo on His New Essay Collection, Life and Art
Monday, June 2
7-8:30 pm
Trefz Forum, The Westport Library