Full name: Trajectory: Stories

Author: Richard Russo Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: Short Stories, Fiction, Contemporary Purchase/reserch links: LibraryThing Goodreads Amazon ISBNs: 9781101947722 1101947721

Russo's characters in these four expansive stories bear little similarity to the blue-collar citizens we're familiar with from many of his novels. In "Horseman," a professor confronts a young plagiarist as well as her own weaknesses as the Thanksgiving holiday looms closer and closer: "And after that, who knew?" In "Intervention," a realtor facing an ominous medical prognosis finds himself in his father's shadow while he presses forward--or not. In "Voice," a semiretired academic is conned by his increasingly estranged brother into coming along on a group tour of the Venice Biennale, fleeing a mortifying incident with a traumatized student back in Massachusetts but encountering further complications in the maze of Venice. And in "Milton and Marcus," a lapsed novelist struggles with his wife's illness and tries to rekindle his screenwriting career, only to be stymied by the pratfalls of that trade when he's called to an aging, iconic star's mountaintop retreat in Wyoming. Similar books: Hall of Small Mammals by Thomas Pierce Love Begins in Winter by Simon Van Booy You Think It, I'll Say It by Curtis Sittenfeld Married Love by Tessa Hadley Tunneling to the Center of the Earth by Kevin Wilson The Universe in Miniature in Miniature by Patrick Somerville Certain American States by Catherine Lacey Throw Like A Girl by Jean Thompson Short Short Stories by Dave Eggers The Beautiful Indifference by Sarah Hall The Dark Dark by Samantha Hunt Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It by Maile Meloy Half in Love by Maile Meloy Birds of a Lesser Paradise by Megan Mayhew Bergman Bark by Lorrie Moore Bridge of Sighs by Richard Russo That Old Cape Magic by Richard Russo Drown by Junot Diaz And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer by Fredrik Backman Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout