Books of the States: Richard Russo on William Kennedy

As identified with Brooklyn as Jonathan Lethem is, Richard Russo is just as strongly associated with his own part of the Empire State, the upstate towns where his novels such as Nobody's Fool, Bridge of Sighs, and The Risk Pool are rooted. (His upcoming novel, That Old Cape Magic, though, takes a road trip to the Massachusetts vacationland of the title--I'll be posting our interview about the book in this space in the next few weeks.) For his representative New York book, he settled, with apologies to all those writers he would have liked to include as well, on the novel of a friend and fellow Pulitzer winner whose home turf of Albany is just a few dozen miles away from Russo's, but in a different world entirely: William Kennedy's Ironweed:

Video: Richard Russo on Ironweed

--Tom