Anyone familiar with Richard Russo’s fiction will...

Anyone familiar with Richard Russo’s fiction will recognize Gloversville, New York.

This is where the author grew up, the son of an ambitious mother and

a second-fiddle father. As Gloversville slides into poverty and illness, Russo’s mother instills in him the dream of a world elsewhere…a dream that has informed Russo’s fiction ever since.

“ It didn’t take long for me to learn that novel writing was a line of work that suited my temperament and played to my strengths, such as they were. . . . I’d discovered how to turn obsession and what my grandmother used to call sheer cussedness [to] my advantage. The same qualities that over a lifetime had contracted my mother’s world had somehow expanded mine. How and by what mechanism? Dumb luck? Grace? I honestly have no idea.”

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