After eight commanding works of fiction, the Pulitzer Prize winner now turns to memoir in a hilarious, moving, and always surprising account of his life, his parents, and the upstate New York town they all struggled variously to escape.
Anyone familiar with Richard Russo's acclaimed novels will recognize Gloversville once famous for producing that eponymous product and anything else made of leather. This is where the author grew up, the only son of an aspirant mother and a charming, feckless father who were born into this close-knit community. But by the time of his childhood in the 1950s, prosperity was inexorably being replaced by poverty and illness (often tannery-related), with everyone barely scraping by under a very low horizon.
A world elsewhere was the dream his mother instilled in Rick, and strived for herself, and their subsequent adventures and tribulations in achieving that goal-beautifully recounted here-were to prove lifelong, as would Gloversville's fearsome grasp on them both. Fraught with the timeless dynamic of going home again, encompassing hopes and fears and the relentless tides of familial and individual complications, this story is arresting, comic, heartbreaking, and truly beautiful, an immediate classic.
Industry Reviews
"An intimate and powerful family story . . . impeccably told." --Chicago Tribune
"Moving and darkly funny. . . . Russo mines grace from his gritty hometown." --The Wall Street Journal
"One of the most honest, moving American memoirs in years. . . . Russo's intellectual and emotional honesty are remarkable." --NPR Books
"Russo conjures the incredible bond between single mother and only child in a way that makes his story particularly powerful." --The Daily Beast
"Redemption is always the prize in a Russo story. Nowhere do we see that more clearly than in Elsewhere, a brave little book in which a writer spins deprivation into advantage, suffering into wisdom, and a broken mother into a muse." --The Washington Post
"Vivid . . . devastating. . . . Russo brings the remarkable compassion he's known for in his fiction to this account." --The Christian Science Monitor
"Russo is the Bruce Springsteen of novelists. . . . In a paragraph or even a phrase, he can summon up a whole world." --Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air
"Funny and winning. . . . This stirring book belongs to Jean and Rick." --The New York Times Book Review
"Filled with insights, by turn tender and tough, about human fidelity, frailty, forbearance, and fortitude." --The Philadelphia Inquirer
"A quietly riveting portrait. . . . Elsewhere depicts the tenacious grip that Gloversville exerted on mother and son alike." --The New York Observer
"Exquisite. . . . Elsewhere is a memoir and a bravura essay, a meditation on negotiating flaws." --The Miami Herald
"Richard Russo has mined his childhood with enormous energy, humor and craftsmanship. . . . Readers discovering Russo through this memoir and then returning to his first few titles are embarking on a delightful voyage with a gifted writer about whom they now know a great deal." --The Seattle Times
"Affecting. . . . Russo's parallel themes of people and place come together elegantly." --San Francisco Chronicle
"A real-life mystery about his mother's demons. . . . Russo writes without bitterness, but with the kind of clear-eyed compassion he bestows on his fictional characters." --USA Today
"Rich and layered. . . . Russo's memoir is an honest book about a universal subject: those familial bonds that only get trickier with time." --Minneapolis Star Tribune
"Outstanding." --Chicago Sun-Times
