Life and Art

📘 About This Book

A marvelous new essay collection from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Somebody's Fool and The Destiny Thief 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.

📖 Summary

Life and Art is a marvelous new essay collection from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Russo. Spanning 209 pages, the book brings together twelve masterful new essays that focus on the twin subjects of life and art, examining how they inform each other and how the stories we tell ourselves about both shape our understanding of the world around us. Throughout the collection, Russo delves into the fundamental questions of creativity and human experience, asking why we tell stories in the first place and how we bridge the gap between what we know and what we cannot know. In the essay titled 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 this is done. He explores the idea that what we do not understand is actually the very thing that beckons to us. In another piece, Stiff Neck, Russo writes of the exasperating fault lines exposed within his own family. Blending insightful personal reflection with deep literary consideration, this 2026 publication offers a window into the mind of a celebrated master of fiction as he turns his sharp, empathetic gaze toward the mechanics of storytelling and the complexities of lived experience. Readers familiar with his acclaimed works will find the same warmth, humor, and philosophical curiosity that define his novels, all distilled into the intimate format of the essay.

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