Mohawk - (Vintage Contemporaries) by Richard Russo (Paperback)

About the Book

Mohawk, New York, is one of those small towns that lie almost entirely on the wrong side of the tracks. Its citizens, too, have fallen on hard times. Dallas Younger, a star athlete in high school, now drifts from tavern to poker game, losing money, and, inevitably, another set of false teeth. His ex-wife, Anne, is stuck in a losing battle with her mother over the care of her sick father. And their son, Randall, is deliberately neglecting his school work--because in a place like Mohawk it doesn't pay to be too smart.

Book Synopsis

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls comes a wonderfully written novel about a small town in New York whose citizens have fallen on hard times.

"Immensely readable and sympathetic.... Mr. Russo has an instinctive gift for capturing the rhythms of small-town life." --The New York Times

Mohawk, New York, is one of those small towns that lie almost entirely on the wrong side of the tracks. Dallas Younger, a star athlete in high school, now drifts from tavern to poker game, losing money, and, inevitably, another set of false teeth. His ex-wife, Anne, is stuck in a losing battle with her mother over the care of her sick father. And their son, Randall, is deliberately neglecting his school work--because in a place like Mohawk it doesn't pay to be too smart.

In Mohawk, Russo explores these lives with profound compassion and flint-hard wit. Out of derailed ambitions and old loves, secret hatreds and communal myths, he has created a richly plotted, densely populated, and wonderfully written novel that captures every nuance of America's backyard.

Look for Richard Russo's new book, Somebody's Fool, coming soon.

From the Back Cover

Mohawk, New York, is one of those small towns that lie almost entirely on the wrong side of the tracks. Its citizens, too, have fallen on hard times. Richard explores these lives with profound compassion and flint-hard wit. Out of derailed ambitions and old loves, secret hatreds and communal myths, he has created a richly plotted, densely populated, and wonderfully written novel that captures every nuance of America's backyard.

Review Quotes

"Moving dramatizes an older, innocent way of life ... brisk, colorful, and often witty." --The New York Times Book Review

"Immensely readable and sympathetic.... Mr. Russo has an instinctive gift for capturing the rhythms of small-town life." --The New York Times

"Richard Russo [is] a masterful storyteller with a mission: to chronicle with insight and compassion the day-to-day life of small-town America ... alternating episodes of boisterous humor with moments of heart-wrenching pathos ... His characters are wholly sympathetic, but they are also human."
--Houston Chronicle

"After the last sentence is read, the reader continues to see Russo's tender, messed-up people coming out of doorways, lurching through life. And keeps on seeing them because they are as real as we are."
--Annie Proulx

"Russo is a master craftsman ... The blue-collar heartache at the center of his fiction has the sheen of Dickens but the epic levity of John Irving."--The Boston Globe

About the Author

RICHARD RUSSO is the author of nine novels, most recently Chances Are..., Everybody's Fool and That Old Cape Magic; two collections of stories; and the memoir Elsewhere. In 2002 he received the Pulitzer Prize for Empire Falls, which, like Nobody's Fool, was adapted into a multiple-award-winning miniseries; in 2017, he received France's Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine. He lives in Port­land, Maine.