The Destiny Thief Essays on Writing, Writers and Life

Richard Russo

eBook - 2018

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 America’s most beloved authors.“I’ve written a lot about destiny in my fiction,” admits Richard Russo, “not because I understand it, but because I’d 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 classmate’s destiny? ...What twists of talent and fate determine a would-be writer’s path?In each of the pieces collected here, Russo considers the unexpected turns of the creative... more