ABOUT
THE BOOK

William Henry Devereaux, Jr. is the unlikely chairman of the English department at West Central Pennsylvania University. Over the course of a single convoluted week he threatens to execute a goose, has his nose slashed by a feminist poet, discovers that his secretary writes better fiction then he does, suspects his wife of having an affair with his dean, and finally confronts his philandering elderly father , the one-time king of American Literary Theory, at an abandoned amusement park. In Hank Devereaux we meet a hero whose humour and identification with the absurd are mitigated by his love for family, friends, and, ultimately, knowledge itself. Richard Russo has written three previous novels, one of which, Nobody’s Fool, was made into a film. He lives in Maine with his family.