Everybodys Fool

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Empire Falls returns to North Bath, the Rust Belt town first brought to unforgettable life in Nobody’s Fool. Now, ten years later, Doug Raymer has become the chief of police and is tormented by the improbable death of his wife—not to mention his suspicion that he was a failure of a husband. Meanwhile, the irrepressible Sully has come into a small fortune, but is suddenly faced with a VA cardiologist’s estimate that he only has a year or two left to live. As Sully frantically works to keep the bad news from the important people in his life, we are reunited with his son and grandson . . . with Ruth, the married woman with whom he carried on for years . . . and with the hapless Rub Squeers, who worries that he and Sully aren’t still best friends. Filled with humor, heart, and hard-luck characters you can’t help but love, Everybody’s Fool is a crowning achievement from one of the great storytellers of our time. Look for Everybody’s Fool, available now, and Somebody’s Fool, coming soon.

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Empire Falls, this slyly funny, moving novel about a blue-collar town in upstate New York—and about Sully, one of its unluckiest citizens, who has been doing the wrong thing triumphantly for fifty years—is a classic American story. "Remarkable.... A revelation of the human heart." —The Washington Post 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. Nobody’s Fool was made into a movie starring Paul Newman, Bruce Willis, Jessica Tandy, and Melody Griffith. Look for Everybody’s Fool, available now, and Somebody’s Fool, coming soon.

Frances Freeborn Pauley, a white woman who grew up in the segregated South, has devoted most of her ninety-four years to the battle against discrimination and prejudice. A champion of civil rights and racial justice and an advocate for the poor and disenfranchised, Pauley's tenacity as an activist and the length of her career are remarkable. She is also a consummate storyteller; for decades, she has shared her words with activists, students, and scholars who have found their way to her door. Kathryn L. Nasstrom uses rich oral history material, recorded by herself and others, to present Frances Pauley in her own words. Pauley's life has encompassed much of the last century of extraordinary social change in the South, a life touching and touched by famous figures from southern politics and the civil rights movement. Highlights of Pauley's career in the public eye include a friendship with Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King, encounters with several of Georgia's civil-rights-era governors, and a meeting with Eleanor Roosevelt. A skillful political organizer, Pauley was involved in decades of community mobilization, repeated efforts to educate politicians and the public about the origins and nature of poverty, and lobbying for unpopular causes. "People are born into a certain way of living," she says. "It takes a jolt to get out of it. It doesn't really mean that they're all that mean and bad, but it takes a jolt to make them see that maybe they could make a change." In a deft blend of biography and memoir, Nasstrom explains Pauley's historical significance and places her story in the context of developments in Georgia politics and the civil rights movement. Even as it contributes to the political history of Georgia and the South, affording insight of unusual depth on familiar issues and events, the book preserves one woman's story in the still largely undocumented history of southern women's social and political activism in the twentieth century. Pauley's experiences serve as a window on the lives of all those women and men who, town by town and state by state, made momentous change not only possible but also inescapable.

From a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, a ferociously intimate story of a family facing the ultimate question: how far will we go to save the people we love the most? When Margaret's fiancée, John, is hospitalized for depression in 1960s London, she faces a choice: carry on with their plans despite what she now knows of his condition, or back away from the suffering it may bring her. She decides to marry him. Imagine Me Gone is the unforgettable story of what unfolds from this act of love and faith. At the heart of it is their eldest son, Michael, a brilliant, anxious music fanatic who makes sense of the world through parody. Over the span of decades, his younger siblings -- the savvy and responsible Celia and the ambitious and tightly controlled Alec -- struggle along with their mother to care for Michael's increasingly troubled and precarious existence. Told in alternating points of view by all five members of the family, this searing, gut-wrenching, and yet frequently hilarious novel brings alive with remarkable depth and poignancy the love of a mother for her children, the often inescapable devotion siblings feel toward one another, and the legacy of a father's pain in the life of a family. With his striking emotional precision and lively, inventive language, Adam Haslett has given us something rare: a novel with the power to change how we see the most important people in our lives. "Haslett is one of the country's most talented writers, equipped with a sixth sense for characterization"-Wall Street Journal "Ambitious and stirring . . . With Imagine Me Gone , Haslett has reached another level."-New York Times Book Review

Everybody's Fool by Richard Russo | Summary & Analysis Preview: Everybody’s Fool, a novel by Richard Russo, is set in the fictional town of North Bath in upstate New York. There, over the course of one weekend, a crew of local eccentrics juggle long-standing grudges, acute crises, and surreal weather events to the best of their limited abilities. Along the way, readers learn about their troubled pasts. At Hilldale Cemetery, Douglas Raymer, chief of police, arrives late for the interment of a local judge. The service is long, and between the heat and his emotional distress, Raymer’s feeling poorly. The setting is stirring up feelings about his late wife, Becka, who died in a freak accident the previous year. Raymer carries an object in his pocket: a garage-door opener that was found in Becka’s car. He thinks he can use it to track down the mystery man Becka had been seeing behind his back before she died. Suddenly, the ground quakes… PLEASE NOTE: This is summary and analysis of the book and NOT the original book. Inside this Instaread Summary of Everybody's Fool: Summary of the Book Important People Character Analysis Analysis of the Themes and Author’s Style About the Author With Instaread, you can get the key takeaways, summary and analysis of a book in 15 minutes. We read every chapter, identify the key takeaways and analyze them for your convenience.

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 the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls. • Now the AMC Original Series Lucky Hank. 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. Look for Richard Russo's new book, Somebody's Fool, coming soon.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • The bestselling author of Nobody's Fool and Straight Man delves deep into the blue-collar heart of America in a work that overflows with hilarity, heartache, and grace. “Rich, humorous ... Mr. Russo’s most seductive book thus far.” —The New York Times 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. Look for Richard Russo's new book, Somebody's Fool, coming soon.