Great product!Product DescriptionWelcome to Empire Falls a blue-collar town full of abandoned mills whose citizens surround themselves with the comforts and feuds provided by lifelong friends and neighbors and who find humor and hope in the most unlikely places in this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Richard Russo.
Miles Roby has been slinging burgers at the Empire Grill for 20 years a job that cost him his college education and much of his self-respect. What keeps him there? It could be his bright sensitive daughter Tick who needs all his help surviving the local high school. Or maybe its Janine Miles soon-to-be ex-wife whos taken up with a noxiously vain health-club proprietor. Or perhaps its the imperious Francine Whiting who owns everything in townand seems to believe that everything includes Miles himself. In Empire Falls Richard Russo delves deep into the blue-collar heart of America in a work that overflows with hilarity heartache and grace.
Empire Falls was also adapted into an HBO mini-series starring Paul Newman?? Ed Harris?? Phillip Seymour Hoffman?? and Helen Hunt.Amazon.com ReviewLike most of Richard Russo's earlier novels?? Empire Fa"I> is a tale of blue-collar life?? which itself increasingly resembles a kind of high-wire act performed without the benefit of any middle-class safety nets. This time?? though?? the author has widened his scope?? producing a comic and compelling ensemble piece. There is?? to be sure?? a protagonist: fortysomething Miles Roby?? proprietor of the local greasy spoon and the recently divorced father of a teenage daughter. But Russo sets in motion a large cast of secondary characters?? drawn from every social stratum of his depressed New England mill town. We meet his ex-wife Janine?? his father Max (another of Russo's cantankerous layabouts)?? and a host of Empire Grill regulars. We're also introduced to Francine Whiting?? a manipulative widow who owns half the town--and who takes a perverse pleasure in pointing out Miles's psychological defects. Miles does indeed have a tendency to take it on the chin. (At one point he alludes to his own "pensity for shit-eating.") And his role as Mr. Nice Guy thrusts him into all sorts of clashes wit