The Destiny Thief: Essays on Writing, Writers and Life by Richard Russo (English

Description: The Destiny Thief by Richard Russo In this "admirable…wry, idiosyncratic, vulnerably bighearted" collection (The New York Times Book Review), the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls powerfully considers the unexpected turns of the creative life and reveals the inner workings of one of Americas most beloved authors."Ive written a lot about destiny in my fiction," admits Richard Russo, "not because I understand it, but because Id like to." In the first of these eleven remarkable essays, Russo shares the story of his onetime fiction workshop classmate who, of the two of them, was considered the class star, bound for literary glory. Yet it was Russo who emerged as a major writer. How, he wonders, did he manage to steal his classmates destiny? What twists of talent and fate determine a would-be writers path?In each of the pieces collected here, Russo considers the unexpected turns of the creative life. From his grandfathers years cutting gloves to his own teenage dreams of rock stardom; from his first college teaching jobs to his dazzling reads of Dickens and Twain; from the roots of his famous novels to his journey accompanying a dear friend—the writer Jennifer Finney Boylan—as she pursued gender reassignment surgery, The Destiny Thief powerfully reveals the inner workings of one of Americas most beloved authors.Look for Richard Russos new book, Somebodys Fool, coming soon. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Author Biography RICHARD RUSSO is the author of nine novels, most recently Chances Are..., Everybodys 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 Nobodys Fool, was adapted into a multiple-award-winning miniseries; in 2017, he received Frances Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine. He lives in Portland, Maine. Review "Admirable.... [Russo is] wry, idiosyncratic, vulnerably bighearted, a craftsman." —The New York Times Book Review"As much fun to read as his best-selling novels.... At times funny, always touching.... If you want to be a writer this is a must book to read." —Albany Times Union"Witty and wise.... Thoughtful, funny, endearing—and surprising." —The Portland Press Herald "Captivating. . . . Generous-hearted. . . . Fully display[s] Russos trademark warmth and wit.... Puzzles with the mysteries of what good writing is and what good living is." —BookPage "A heartfelt exploration of [Russos] life as a writer." —PopSugar "More than a few wise reflections on the craft of writing." —Southern Living "Masterful.... Wonderfully candid." —Tulsa Book Review "A remarkable and insightful exploration into the mind of a wonderful writer." —Book Reporter "All-encompassing.... Anyone in search of an eye-opening series of essays by a distinguished writer about writing and the writing life need look no further." —The National Book Review "Certain to please anyone familiar with his short fiction and novels.... Readers seeking a deeply insightful record of the creative process and the life guiding it will find resonance here." —Library Journal (starred review) "[A] splendid collection.... These are wise, personal pieces, and readers get to know the author as a comforting, funny, and welcoming guy." —Kirkus Reviews "Brilliant.... Scholarly yet accessible.... Russo lets his readers behind the curtain to divulge the myriad sources of his profound wisdom and boundless generosity as both writer and teacher." —Booklist "Dazzling and moving.... Reveal[s] glimpses of forces that drive a bestselling fiction writer." —Publishers Weekly Review Quote "As a whole, the book is a quest to understand nothing less than why life turns out the way it does . . . He weaves scenes from [his] destiny-swapping years--the gut-punching failures; the life of teaching that enabled the life of writing--with literary long takes, illuminating a winding road trip . . . Perhaps whats most admirable about these essays is their genial and searching tone. In this know-it-all age Russo places his faith in the ideals of art--ambiguity, paradox, heresy, the sublime--over the black-and-white ideologies or our current politics."--Jay Fielden, New York Times Book Review "A heartfelt exploration of [Russos] life as a writer."--Chelsea Adelaine Hassler, POPSUGAR "20 Best New Books to Read in May" "Readers who come to this book in search of the storyteller they know from Russos fiction will be well-rewarded. . . . [He] proves to be a familiar presence--thoughtful, funny, endearing--and surprising, as well. . . . Russo delivers the cozy intelligence and comic savvy that readers have come to admire."--Joan Silverman, Portland Press Herald "A remarkable and insightful exploration into the mind of a wonderful writer."--Stuart Shiffman, Book Reporter "All-encompassing. . . . Anyone in search of an eye-opening series of essays by a distinguished writer about writing and the writing life need look no further."--Robert Allen Papinchak, The National Book Review "Captivating . . . generous-hearted essays on writing and life [that] fully display Russos trademark warmth and wit, and are marked by a fair dose of unpretentious wisdom and a genuineness that sometimes borders on self-effacement. . . . The Destiny Thief puzzles with the mysteries of what good writing is and what good living is."--Robert Weibezahl, BookPage "Splendid. . . . These are wise, personal pieces, and readers get to know the author as a comforting, funny, and welcoming guy."-- Kirkus "Certain to please anyone familiar with his short fiction and novels. . . . The unselfconscious voice threading through these nine explorations of writing, writers, and everyday life is a welcome alternative to the all-too-common introspection and fraught literariness found in many recent memoir and essay collections from prominent authors. Readers seeking a deeply insightful record of the creative process and the life guiding it will find resonance here."-- Library Journal (starred) "For aspiring writers, Russos musings on the art and craft of the novel are a trove of knowledge and guidance. For adoring readers, they are a window into the imagination and inspiration for Russos beloved novels, screenplays, and short stories. . . . Few authors seem as approachable in print and, one suspects, in person as acclaimed novelist Russo."-- Booklist "Russos colorful book offers his novels fans more of his dazzling and moving writing, often revealing glimpses of forces that drive a bestselling fiction writer."-- Publishers Weekly Excerpt from Book Chapter 1 The Destiny Thief "As a writer, you arent anybody until you become somebody." --James Salter "I am the same man I was when I was a struggling nobody . . . still a writer trying to find his way through a maze. Should I be anything else?" --Raymond Chandler Some time ago I had a lengthy telephone conversation with a man Ill call David. Id known him nearly forty years earlier at the University of Arizona, where we shared a fiction workshop taught by the writer Robert C. S. Downs, who encouraged both of us, but David especially. At the time I was finishing up my PhD in American literature, so when I asked Downs about taking a workshop, I assumed hed put me in one at the graduate level, but he didnt. My prose, he explained, was full of jargon and intellectual pretension. Most writers had about a thousand pages of shitty prose in them, he went on, and these have to be expelled before they can hope to write seriously. "In your case," he added, "make it two thousand." And so, pushing thirty, I swallowed my pride and enrolled in a workshop full of twenty-year-olds, many of whom were better writers than I was. David was working on a novel about a rock-and-roll band, and having once played in a band myself, I was envious of both his subject matter and his bold talent and even more jealous of the fact that at age twenty hed already figured out what he wanted to do with his life, whereas Id wasted the better part of a decade pursuing an advanced degree I no longer really wanted. What I didnt know about David was what a rough time he was having outside the classroom. His mother, whom hed dearly loved, had recently died of cancer, and his father was an emotional tyrant. David himself had very little money and was drinking heavily. Indeed, the fiction workshop--his dream of becoming a novelist one day--was just about all that was holding him together. Then, near the end of the semester, he got in trouble, courtesy of his poet girlfriend. Shed been assigned six poems, and the day before they were due she hadnt written a single line. When she told David she was thinking about dropping the course, he said, "Nonsense. Well write them now. How hard can it be?" So they sat down and did just that, the girlfriend writing three poems, David the other three. They both thought the results were pretty good, but the girlfriend was unprepared for the praise lavished on the poems, in particular the one David had written about his mother. After class, she made the mistake of confiding to a classmate that all of the poems had been written the night before, half of them by her boyfriend. When her friend reported the infraction, both she and David were hauled before Downs, the director of creative writing, to explain themselves. The girlfriend arrived at the meeting determined to defend the work as her own. David, they agreed beforehand, would admit only to offering advice. But this wasnt Downss first experience with academic dishonesty, and instead of asking if shed written the poems in question, he quoted the best line from the whole batch of poems and asked if shed written it; she immediately broke down. Since shed come clean and it was her first offense, Downs said hed recommend a D in the course but no mark on her record. He then turned to his star fiction writer and said, "Good poems." David sighed, accepting the compliment, proud to have written the line that his mentor so admired, but fearful of what came next. The dishonesty charge was the least of it, he confessed. He was out of money and about to be evicted from the shithole where he was living. Hed dropped the rest of his courses earlier in the term, and though he hated the idea, there was nothing to do but return home in defeat. He hadnt intended to tell Downs any of this, but there he was, spilling his guts about how much the workshop meant to him and how much he hated the idea of not completing it. When he asked what his grade would be, Downs said hed be getting the A hed earned and added, perhaps to bolster his spirits, that it would likely be the only one in the class. Apparently we were not a stellar group. "What about Rick?" David asked. After all, I was a grad student. Downs shrugged. "Rick doesnt want to be a writer. He wants to be a teacher." (He was wrong about that, but he couldnt have known. After getting the PhD, I did plan on applying for teaching positions.) Now fast-forward to 2002. For both David and me a lot has happened. Hes eventually finished his undergraduate degree, then gone on to graduate school for an MFA in poetry, not fiction. He has married, had kids, is teaching college to support his writing habit and has become middle-aged. Hes continued to struggle periodically with alcohol but remained functional, enjoyed success as a poet and become something of a legend among his students. Along the way hes finished that rock-and-roll novel, but frustrated by his inability to find an agent, finally published it himself. Maybe his life isnt the one he imagined back in Tucson, but for the most part hes been pretty happy. Until one day he picks up the University of Arizona alumni magazine and discovers that a student from his undergraduate workshop (who did indeed get a B) has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. According to the article, the prizewinner taught for a while before quitting to write full-time. David feels something inside him come untethered--and really, who could blame him? Somehow he and I have swapped destinies. He is the teacher, I the writer. He wants someone to explain the cosmic mechanism by which such a cruel joke could be perpetrated. In fact, hed like me to explain. As if Id know. Ive written a lot about destiny in my fiction, not because I understand it, but because Id like to. If David was puzzled by the narrative arc of our lives, he wasnt alone. At the risk of sounding falsely modest, I have to say Im not aware of anyone--teacher, family member, friend--who predicted anything like the great good fortune that has befallen me in the writing career that I came to fairly late. Some years ago I ran into an old girlfriend who said shed been following my work with both pleasure and mystification. "I always thought you were a nice enough guy," she told me, clearly trying to puzzle it through and not wanting to hurt my feelings, "but I never dreamed you had books in you." I know exactly how she felt. I cant explain it even now. Anyone whos interested in my early life can have a look at my memoir Elsewhere, though for the purposes of this discussion a thumbnail sketch will suffice. I lived the first eighteen years of my life in Gloversville, a poor mill town in upstate New York. Raised Catholic, I was for many years an altar boy. My parents separated when I was a kid, so I was brought up by my nervous mother, who hated where we lived, and by my grandparents, who owned the house we lived in. If my mother was adamant about anything, it was that, as an American, I could be whatever I wanted to be. That I was as good as anybody. I was always to remember this in case anyone had the temerity to suggest otherwise. My mostly absent father had come to a whole different set of conclusions. He was part of the Normandy invasion and returned from the war with a personal philosophy that fit neatly onto his favorite coffee mug, which I still have: heres to you as good as you are and heres to me, as bad as i am, but as good as you are and as bad as i am, im as good as you are, as bad as i am. It was, now that I think about it, the joke version of my mothers mantra, and to complete this gag the mugs handle was on the inside of the cylinder. Call it an object lesson: that being as good as anybody might not be of much use if you had to go through life with a basic design flaw. For my father, being born poor was just such a flaw. Having a name that ended in a vowel was another. But never mind, my mother said. In addition to America, she believed in education and its ability to negate any of these flaws. My high school was tiny, and without expending much effort I flourished there. I had enough of my fathers easy charm to talk most people into giving me what I wanted; and on the others I could employ my mothers tidal persistence, her innate ability to nick away at people until they gave me what I was after, just to be rid of me. The University of Arizona was twice the size of my hometown, though, and what a rude awakening that was. My first day there I went to the registrars office, hoping to do something out of sequence, probably register early for classes, and was met by a grim woman who sized me up at a glance. Holding up a hand to stop me midexplanation, she said, "Have you matriculated?" The question stopped me cold. I didnt want to admit I had no idea what the word meant. Her tone made it sound rather personal, almost sexual, but that couldnt be, could it? I had a fifty-fifty chance of being right, though, so I said no, not recently, but I was willing to if it was strictly necessary. Tomorrow, I was told sternly. I was a freshman and would matriculate with the rest of my class tomorrow and not before. What I was asking for, she explained, was special treatment, and I wasnt going to get it, not from her. My roommate that first semester was a boy from a tiny Arizona mining town that he was clearly homesick for already, less than twenty-four hours after leaving it. He couldnt tell me enough about the place, which was apparently perfect in every respect. He seemed to have little interest in his classes, and as the semester wore on he had a devil of a time making friends. He wanted to pledge a fraternity, but none would have him. Back hom Details ISBN0525435336 Author Richard Russo Short Title DESTINY THIEF Pages 240 Language English ISBN-10 0525435336 ISBN-13 9780525435334 Format Paperback DEWEY 814.54 Year 2019 Publication Date 2019-06-04 Subtitle Essays on Writing, Writers and Life Country of Publication United States AU Release Date 2019-06-04 NZ Release Date 2019-06-04 US Release Date 2019-06-04 UK Release Date 2019-06-04 Place of Publication New York Publisher Random House USA Inc Imprint Vintage Books Audience General We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:137919499;

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