Peu de temps après la disparition de sa mère, Richard Russo lui consacre un récit d'une infinie tendresse. Avec humour, le lauréat du Prix Pulitzer décrypte les liens indéfectibles entre une mère et son fils et nous restitue avec justesse le portrait de cette mère abusive et autoritaire. En décrivant la société américaine des années 30 à nos jours, il évoque son enfance passée dans la banlieue de New York, mais aussi sa vie adulte avec la naissance de ses enfants et toujours sa mère qui le suit comme une ombre encombrante. Un vibrant hommage qui prend aux tripes !

'A wise and witty drama of small-town life . . . delivering the generous humour, keen ear for dialogue, and deep appreciation for humanity's foibles that have endeared the author to his readers for decades' Publishers Weekly

Ten years after the death of the magnetic Donald 'Sully' Sullivan, the town of North Bath is going through a major transition as it is taken over by its much wealthier neighbour, Schuyler Springs. Peter, Sully's son, is still grappling with his father's tremendous legacy as well as his relationship to his own son, Thomas, wondering if he has been all that different a father than Sully was to him.

Meanwhile, the towns' newly consolidated police department falls into the hands of Charice Bond following the resignation of Doug Raymer, the former North Bath police chief and Charice's ex-boyfriend.

When a decomposing body turns up in the abandoned hotel situated between the two towns, Charice and Raymer are drawn together again and forced to address their complicated attraction to one another. Across town, Ruth, Sully's married ex-lover, struggles to understand her granddaughter, Tina, and her growing obsession with Peter's other son, Will. Amidst the turmoil, the town's residents speculate on the identity of the unidentified body and wonder who among their number could have disappeared unnoticed.

Brimming with warmth, wisdom and Russo's signature wry humour, Somebody's Fool is another classic from a modern master of storytelling. Lire la suite Fermer

This slyly funny, moving novel about a blue-collar town in upstate New York--and in the life of Sully, of one of its unluckiest citizens, who has been doing the wrong thing triumphantly for fifty years--is a classic American story. Divorced from his own wife and carrying on halfheartedly with another man's, saddled with a bum knee and friends who make enemies redundant, Sully now has one new problem to cope with: a long-estranged son who is in imminent danger of following in his father's footsteps. With its uproarious humor and a heart that embraces humanity's follies as well as its triumphs, Nobody's Fool , from Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Richard Russo, is storytelling at its most generous. Nobodys Fool was made into a movie starring Paul Newman, Bruce Willis, Jessica Tandy, and Melody Griffith.
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A New York Times 2016 Notable Book An immediate national best seller and instant classic from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls . Richard Russo returns to North Bath--a town where dishonesty abounds, everyone misapprehends everyone else and half the citizens are half-crazy ( The New York Times )--and the characters who made Nobodys Fool a beloved choice of book clubs everywhere. Everybodys Fool is classic Russo, filled with humor, heart, hard times, and people you cant help but love, possibly because their various faults make them so human. Everybodys Fool picks up roughly a decade since we were last with Miss Beryl and Sully on New Year's Eve 1984. The irresistible Sully, who in the intervening years has come by some unexpected good fortune, is staring down a VA cardiologists estimate that he has only a year or two left, and its hard work trying to keep this news from the most important people in his life: Ruth, the married woman he carried on with for years . . . the ultra-hapless Rub Squeers, who worries that he and Sully arent still best friends . . . Sullys son and grandson, for whom he was mostly an absentee figure (and now a regretful one). We also enjoy the company of Doug Raymer, the chief of police whos obsessing primarily over the identity of the man his wife mightve been about to run off with, before dying in a freak accident . . . Baths mayor, the former academic Gus Moynihan, whose wife problems are, if anything, even more pressing . . . and then theres Carl Roebuck, whose lifelong run of failing upward might now come to ruin. And finally, theres Charice Bond--a light at the end of the tunnel that is Chief Raymers office--as well as her brother, Jerome, who might well be the train barreling into the station. A crowning achievement--like hopping on the last empty barstool surrounded by old friends ( Entertainment Weekly )--from one of the greatest storytellers of our time.
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Sumptuous, spirited . . . [Russo] paints a shining fresco of a working-class community... --


Ten years after the death of the magnetic Donald Sully Sullivan, the town of North Bath is going through a major transition as it is annexed by its much wealthier neighbor, Schuyler Springs. Peter, Sullys son, is still grappling with his fathers tremendous legacy as well as his relationship to his own son, Thomas, wondering if he has been all that different a father than Sully was to him.

Meanwhile, the towns newly consolidated police department falls into the hands of Charice Bond, after the resignation of Doug Raymer, the former North Bath police chief and Charices ex-lover. When a decomposing body turns up in the abandoned hotel situated between the two towns, Charice and Raymer are drawn together again and forced to address their complicated attraction to one another. Across town, Ruth, Sullys married ex-lover, and her daughter Janey struggle to understand Janeys daughter, Tina, and her growing obsession with Peters other son, Will. Amidst the turmoil, the towns residents speculate on the identity of the unidentified body, and wonder who among their number could have disappeared unnoticed.

Infused with all the wry humor and shrewd observations that Russo is known for, Lire la suite Fermer

Ayant décidé de tout quitter par amour, parcourant des milliers de kilomètres dans l'espoir de fonder leur propre famille, un homme et une femme emmenaient un pauvre petit immigré bossu dont la laideur suscitait l'hilarité générale. Sans connaître les raisons d'une telle destinée, il luttait pour vivre comme tout le monde. N'ayant nulle part où se réfugier, il cédait toujours face à ses adversaires et se soumettait sans cesse pour ne plus subir le regard des autres. Cette attitude lui paraissait être la plus sage. Grâce à ses chimères qui lui donnaient la foi, rêvant d'amour et de liberté, il voulait croire en ses capacités, alors que personne n'acceptait de lui faire confiance.

The characters in these four expansive stories are a departure from the blue-collar denizens that populate so many of Richard Russos novels; and all are bound together by parallel moments of reckoning with their pasts. In Horseman, a young professor confronts an undergraduate plagiarist--as well as her own regrets. In Intervention, a realtor facing a serious medical prognosis finds himself in his late fathers shadow. Voice gives us a semiretired academic who is conned by his estranged brother into joining a group tour of the Venice Biennale. And Milton and Marcus takes us into a lapsed novelists attempt to rekindle his screenwriting career--a career that depends wholly, at a crucial moment, on two Hollywood icons (one living, one dead). Shot through with Russos inimitable humor, wisdom, and surprise, Trajectory is the work of a masterful writer continuing to discover new heights.
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Winner of the Pulitzer Prize

"Russo writes with a warm, vibrant humanity.... A stirring mix of poignancy, drama and comedy." --The Washington Post

Welcome to Empire Falls, a blue-collar town full of abandoned mills whose citizens surround themselves with the comforts and feuds provided by lifelong friends and neighbors and who find humor and hope in the most unlikely places, in this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Richard Russo.

Miles Roby has been slinging burgers at the Empire Grill for 20 years, a job that cost him his college education and much of his self-respect. What keeps him there? It could be his bright, sensitive daughter Tick, who needs all his help surviving the local high school. Or maybe it's Janine, Miles' soon-to-be ex-wife, who's taken up with a noxiously vain health-club proprietor. Or perhaps it's the imperious Francine Whiting, who owns everything in town-and seems to believe that "everything" includes Miles himself. In Empire Falls Richard Russo delves deep into the blue-collar heart of America in a work that overflows with hilarity, heartache, and grace. Lire la suite Fermer

This moving novel follows Louis Charles Lynch (Lucy) as he and his wife of forty years are about to embark on a vacation to Italy. Lucy is sixty years old and has spent his entire life in Thomaston, New York. Like his late, beloved father, Lucy is an optimist, though hes had plenty of reasons not to be--chief among them his mother, still indomitably alive. Yet it was her shrewdness, combined with that Lynch optimism, that had propelled them years ago to the right side of the tracks and created an empire of convenience stores about to be passed on to the next generation. Lucy's oldest friend, once a rival for his wife's affection, leads a life in Venice far removed from Thomaston. In fact, the exact nature of their friendship is one of the many mysteries Lucy hopes to untangle in the history hes writing of his hometown and family. And with his story interspersed with that of Noonan, the native son whod fled so long ago, the destinies building up around both of them (and Sarah, too) are relentless, constantly surprising, and utterly revealing. Bridge of Sighs , from the beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls , is a moving novel about small-town America that expands Russo's widely heralded achievement in ways both familiar and astonishing.
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Seul au milieu d'une campagne glaciale, poursuivi par des meurtriers, un inconnu tente de survivre à tout prix. Dénué de tout, excepté la mince couche de vêtements qu'il porte sur lui, il résiste à toutes les agressions extérieures, apprenant ainsi ce qu'est la rudesse de la vie. Se demandant si son heure est venue, il décide pourtant, grâce à son amour de la vie, de ne pas se résigner et de lutter. Sentant l'air entrer par ses narines et ressortir par sa bouche, son coeur battant à tout rompre, ses veines bleues gonflent au travers de sa peau translucide. Ne voyant pour tout horizon que le ciel et la terre, il se demande combien de temps encore il pourra contempler ces deux éléments.

Sur fond de paysages tour à tour rudes ou enchanteurs, se nouent et se dénouent des situations déroutantes.
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Hilarious and true-to-life, witty, compassionate, and impossible to put down, Straight Man follows Hank Devereaux through one very bad week in this novel from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Russo. William Henry Devereaux, Jr., is the reluctant chairman of the English department of a badly underfunded college in the Pennsylvania rust belt. Devereaux's reluctance is partly rooted in his character--he is a born anarchist--and partly in the fact that his department is more savagely divided than the Balkans. In the course of a single week, Devereaux will have his nose mangled by an angry colleague, imagine his wife is having an affair with his dean, wonder if a curvaceous adjunct is trying to seduce him with peach pits, and threaten to execute a goose on local television. All this while coming to terms with his philandering father, the dereliction of his youthful promise, and the ominous failure of certain vital body functions. In short, Straight Man is classic Russo--side-splitting, poignant, compassionate, and unforgettable.
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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, inevitably, another set of false teeth. His ex-wife, Anne, is stuck in a losing battle with her mother over the care of her sick father. And their son, Randall, is deliberately neglecting his school work--because in a place like Mohawk it doesn't pay to be too smart. In Mohawk, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Richard Russo, explores these lives with profound compassion and flint-hard wit. Out of derailed ambitions and old loves, secret hatreds and communal myths, he has created a richly plotted, densely populated, and wonderfully written novel that captures every nuance of America's backyard. Lire la suite Fermer

A wonderfully funny, perceptive novel The Risk Pool is set in Mohawk, New York, where Ned Hall is doing his best to grow up, even though neither of his estranged parents can properly be called adult.

His father, Sam, cultivates bad habits so assiduously that he is stuck at the bottom of his auto insurance risk pool. His mother, Jenny, is slowly going crazy from resentment at a husband who refuses either to stay or to stay away. As Ned veers between allegiances to these grossly inadequate role models, Richard Russo gives us a book that overflows with outsized characters and outlandish predicaments and whose vision of family is at once irreverent and unexpectedly moving.

In the traditions of Thornton Wilder and Anne Tyler, The Risk Pool was hailed by The New York Times as superbly original and maliciously funny. Russo proves himself a master at evoking the sights, feelings, and smells of a town. Lire la suite Fermer

L'Argonos est un immense vaisseau qui abrite des milliers d'êtres humains depuis des générations. Tous ont oublié depuis longtemps le but de leur voyage. Bartolomeo Aguilera, handicapé, enferré dans un exosquelette, mais doté d'une intelligence hors du commun, est le conseiller du capitaine. Il sera ses yeux au sein de l'équipe d'exploration d'Antioche, une planète qui émet une transmission probablement humaine. Une colonie? Sans doute. Mais ils sont tous morts, massacrés avec barbarie. Que s'est-il passé sur Antioche ? Pourquoi une telle atrocité ? Et surtout, commise par qui?

On a ship without a mission ... No one remembers where they came from or where they're going. For hundreds of years, the starship Argonos, home to generations of humans, has wandered throughout the galaxy, searching for other signs of life. Now, a steady, unidentified transmission lures them toward a nearby planet. On a planet without inhabitants ... The colony has vanished. But deep within the planet's steamy jungles, the exploration team find horrible evidence of its fate: a cavernous chamber neatly filled with rows of skeletons, each one hanging on its own hook. On a collision course with the unknown ... Once more, a signal lures the crew of the Argonos. Haunted by what they have seen, they have no choice but to follow - deep into space, where an alien mystery waits. Lire la suite Fermer