Author Richard Russo on His New Essay Collection, 'Life and Art'

Author Richard Russo is bringing his newest essay collection, , to The Westport Library! Enjoy an insightful conversation between Russo and popular book reviewer Suzanne Leopold as they discuss his new release.

About Life and Art

Across his distinguished career as a writer, Russo's novels have intimately captured the human experience — and his newest essay collection Life and Art is no different.

Life and Art — these are the twin subjects considered in Richard Russo’s 12 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.

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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, Maine.

Suzanne Leopold is the creator of SuzyApproved.com, where she shares book reviews to an audience of over 10 thousand. She is also the founder of Suzy Approved Book Tours, where she aggregates her community of bloggers across social media platforms to support authors with book launches. She also served as a juror for the 2024 Westport Prize For Literature. A Westport resident for over 20 years, she enjoys spending time with her husband and two teenage sons.

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