Dec 23, 2009

Empire Falls | What Do I Read Next?

The Great Gatsby (1925), by F. Scott Fitzgerald, is one of Russo’s favorite novels; Francine Whiting quotes the last line of it when she meets with Miles in the Planning and Development Office in chapter 2.

Russo also counts Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860–1861) as one of his favorites and Dickens as one of his favorite authors. Russo’s novels often have a large cast of quirky characters that more than one critic has described as Dickensian.

Russo’s second novel, The Risk Pool (1988), is probably the most autobiographical of...