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Mohawk by Richard Russo — book cover

Mohawk

by Richard Russo
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Overview

Originally published in 1986 in the Vintage Contemporaries paperback series—and reissued now in hardcover alongside his masterful new novel, Empire Falls—Richard Russo's Mohawk remains today as it was described then: A first novel with all the assurance of a mature writer at the peak of form and ambition, Mohawk is set in upstate New York and chronicles over a dozen lives in a leather town, long after the tanneries have started closing down. Ranging over three generations—and clustered mainly in two clans, the Grouses and the Gaffneys—these remarkably various lives share only the common human dilemmas and the awesome physical and emotional presence of Mohawk itself.

For this is a town like Winesburg, Ohio or Our Town, in our time, that encompasses a plethora of characters, events and mysteries. At once honestly tragic and sharply, genuinely funny, Mohawk captures life, then affirms it.

About the Author:
Richard Russo's novels The Risk Pool, Nobody's Fool and Straight Man are available in Vintage paperback. He now lives in coastal Maine with his wife and their two daughters.

Synopsis

Originally published in 1986 in the Vintage Contemporaries paperback series—and reissued now in hardcover alongside his masterful new novel, Empire Falls—Richard Russo's Mohawk remains today as it was described then: A first novel with all the assurance of a mature writer at the peak of form and ambition, Mohawk is set in upstate New York and chronicles over a dozen lives in a leather town, long after the tanneries have started closing down. Ranging over three generations—and clustered mainly in two clans, the Grouses and the Gaffneys—these remarkably various lives share only the common human dilemmas and the awesome physical and emotional presence of Mohawk itself.

For this is a town like Winesburg, Ohio or Our Town, in our time, that encompasses a plethora of characters, events and mysteries. At once honestly tragic and sharply, genuinely funny, Mohawk captures life, then affirms it.

About the Author:
Richard Russo's novels The Risk Pool, Nobody's Fool and Straight Man are available in Vintage paperback. He now lives in coastal Maine with his wife and their two daughters.

Houston Chronicle

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.

About the Author, Richard Russo

Known for his sly humor and his touchingly real characters, Richard Russo s novels about the perennial odd man out are notable for both their sharp turns of phrase and for their nuance. The film version of Nobody's Fool earned him a wider audience, but the Pulitzer in 2001 for Empire Falls ensured a spotlight on his work for years to come.

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Editorials

Boston Globe

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.

Houston Chronicle

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.

Book Details

Published
April 1, 1994
Publisher
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Pages
432
Format
Paperback
ISBN
9780679753827

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