Made possible by the Drue Heinz Trust

The winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Empire Falls, Richard Russo, follows his bestselling Everybody’s Fool with Trajectory, a collection of short fiction that masterfully employs details and dialogue in perfectly calibrated narration.

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;
• In “Intervention,” a realtor facing an ominous medical prognosis finds himself in his father’s shadow;
• In “Voice,” a semiretired academic is conned by his increasingly estranged brother into coming along on a group tour of the Venice Biennale; and
• In “Milton and Marcus,” a lapsed novelist struggles with his wife’s illness and tries to rekindle his screenwriting career.

Richard Russo is the author of eight novels, two collections of short stories, and a memoir. In 2002, he received the Pulitzer Prize for Empire Falls, which was also adapted into an HBO miniseries starring Paul Newman, Ed Harris, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and Helen Hunt.