The Destiny Thief Essays on Writing, Writers and Life

“I’ve written a lot about destiny in my fiction,” admits Richard Russo, “not because I understand it, but because I’d like to.” In the first of these eleven remarkable essays, Russo shares the story of his onetime fiction workshop classmate who, of the two of them, was considered the class star, bound for literary glory. Yet it was Russo who emerged as a major writer. How, he wonders, did he manage to steal his classmate’s destiny? What twists of talent and fate determine a would-be writer’s path?

In each of the pieces collected here, Russo considers the unexpected turns of the creative life. From his grandfather’s years cutting gloves to his own teenage dreams of rock stardom; from his first college teaching jobs to his dazzling reads of Dickens and Twain; from the roots of his famous novels to his journey accompanying a dear friend—the writer Jennifer Finney Boylan—as she pursued gender reassignment surgery, The Destiny Thief powerfully reveals the inner workings of one of America’s most beloved authors.

With Two New Essays


Look for Everybody’s Fool, available now, and Somebody’s Fool, coming soon.

Richard Russo is the author of eight novels, most recently 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 to film, in a multiple-award-winning HBO miniseries; in 2016 he was given the Indie Champion Award by the American Booksellers Association; and in 2017 he received France’s Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine. He lives in Port­land, Maine.