Anyone familiar with Richard Russo’s fiction will recognize Gloversville, New York.

This is where the author grew up, the son of an ambitious mother and

a second-fiddle father. As Gloversville slides into poverty and illness, Russo’s mother instills in him the dream of a world elsewhere…a dream that has informed Russo’s fiction ever since.

“ It didn’t take long for me to learn that novel writing was a line of work that suited my temperament and played to my strengths, such as they were. . . . I’d discovered how to turn obsession and what my grandmother used to call sheer cussedness [to] my advantage. The same qualities that over a lifetime had contracted my mother’s world had somehow expanded mine. How and by what mechanism? Dumb luck? Grace? I honestly have no idea.”

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