The best-selling author of nine novels, including the 2002 Pulitzer Prize–winning Empire Falls, collects a dozen new essays exploring how life and art inform each other and how the stories we hold dear shape both our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. In the first half of the collection, simply titled “Life,” Russo offers intimate reflections on family and love, including “Triage,” in which he describes the terror of seeing his seven-year-old grandson in critical condition with a collapsed lung. The essays in the second section, “Art,” deal more directly with the writer’s craft, as in “The Lives of Others,” in which Russo tackles the thorny issue of appropriation, and “Words and Their Arrangement,” in which he asserts that “while it’s possible to be careless with language and be a successful writer, it’s not possible to be a great one, for the simple reason that words matter.”
