Richard Russo at the Cambridge Public Library

Harvard Book Store and the Cambridge Public Library welcome Richard Russo—Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Somebody's Fool and The Destiny Thief—for a discussion of his new essay collection Life and Art. He will be joined in conversation by Andre Dubus III—author of Such Kindness and eight other books, including the bestsellers Townie and House of Sand and Fog.

RSVP for free to this event or choose the "Book-Included" ticket to reserve a copy of Life and Art and pick it up at the event. Richard Russo will sign copies of his book after the presentation.

Note: Books bundled with tickets may only be picked up at the venue the night of the event, and cannot be picked up in-store beforehand. Ticket holders who purchased a book-included ticket and are unable to attend the event will be able to pick up their book at Harvard Book Store up to 30 days following the event. This offer expires after 30 days. Please note we cannot guarantee signed copies will be available to ticket holders who do not attend the event.

Life and Art—these are the twin subjects considered in Richard Russo’s twelve masterful new essays—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 reflects on the implacable fact that writers use people, insisting that what matters, in the end, is how and for what purpose. How do you bridge the gap between what you know and what you don’t, and sometimes can’t, know? Why tell a story in the first place? What we don’t understand, Russo opines, is in fact the very thing that beckons to us. In “Stiff Neck,” he writes of the exasperating fault lines exposed within his own family as his wife’s sister and her husband—proudly unvaccinated—develop COVID. In “Triage,” he details with heartbreaking vividness the terror of seeing his seven-year-old grandson in critical condition. And in “Ghosts,” he revisits Gloversville, the town that gave rise to the now-legendary fictional town of North Bath, and confronts the specter of its richly populated past and its ghostly present.

Sharp, tender, extraordinarily intimate reflections on work, culture, love, and family from one of the great writers of our time.

Richard Russo is the author of nine novels, most recently Somebody's Fool, Chances Are . . . , Everybody’s Fool, and That Old Cape Magic; two collections of stories; and the memoir Elsewhere. In 2002 he 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. In 2017 he received France’s Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine. He lives in Port­land, ME.

Andre Dubus III is the author of Such Kindness and eight other books, including the bestsellers Townie, a memoir; and House of Sand and Fog, a National Book Award Finalist in Fiction and an Oprah’s Book Club selection. He lives in Newburyport, Massachusetts.

Masks are encouraged but not required for this event.

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