Start gifting
Libro.fm for Business
Start a membership, get two free audiobooks
Bookseller Created
Growing Up & Getting Older
Celebrate indie bookstores with our limited-time sale!
Shop the sale
Send as gift
Add to Wish List
Almost ready!
In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.
Log in Create account
Shop the sale
In celebration of Independent Bookstore Day, shop our limited-time sale on bestselling audiobooks from April 22nd-28th. Don’t miss out—purchases support your local bookstore!
Shop nowStraight Man
A Novel
Narrator
Sam Freed
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn more
Length
14 hours 11 minutes
Language
English
William Henry Devereaux, Jr., spiritually suited to playing left field but forced by a bad hamstring to try first base, 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 duck, has his nose slashed by a feminist poet, discovers that his secretary writes better fiction than 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.
Such is the canvas of Richard Russo's Straight Man, a novel of surpassing wit, poignancy, and insight. As he established in his previous books -- Mohawk, The Risk Pool, and Nobody's Fool -- Russo is unique among contemporary authors for his ability to flawlessly capture the soul of the wise guy and the heart of a difficult parent. In Hank Devereaux, Russo has created a hero whose humor and identification with the absurd are mitigated only by his love for his family, friends, and, ultimately, knowledge itself.
Unforgettable, compassionate, and laugh-out-loud funny, Straight Man cements Richard Russo's reputation as one of the master storytellers of our time.
Richard Russo is the author of eight novels, two collections of stories, and Elsewhere, a memoir. In 2002 he received the Pulitzer Prize for Empire Falls, which, like Nobody’s Fool, was adapted for the screen in a multiple-award-winning HBO miniseries. In 2016 he published Everybody's Fool, a sequel to his 1993 book Nobody's Fool.
Sam Freed is an American actor who has performed on Broadway, television, and in movies. His first major regular role on television was as Bob Barsky in the last three seasons of Kate & Allie. In the short-lived television series Ferris Bueller, he played Bill Bueller, the father of the title character. He also portrayed James C. Whiting III, the executive editor of the Baltimore Sun, in the fifth and final season of The Wire.
Richard Russo is the author of eight novels, two collections of stories, and Elsewhere, a memoir. In 2002 he received the Pulitzer Prize for Empire Falls, which, like Nobody’s Fool, was adapted for the screen in a multiple-award-winning HBO miniseries. In 2016 he published Everybody's Fool, a sequel to his 1993 book Nobody's Fool.
Sam Freed is an American actor who has performed on Broadway, television, and in movies. His first major regular role on television was as Bob Barsky in the last three seasons of Kate & Allie. In the short-lived television series Ferris Bueller, he played Bill Bueller, the father of the title character. He also portrayed James C. Whiting III, the executive editor of the Baltimore Sun, in the fifth and final season of The Wire.
Reviews
"The funniest serious novel I have read since—well, maybe since Portnoy's Complaint." —The New York Times Book Review"There is a big, wry heart beating at the center of Russo's fiction." —The New Yorker
"[Russo] skewers academic pretensions and infighting with mad abandon...in a clear and muscular prose that is a pleasaure to read....I had to stop often to guffaw, gasp, wheeze, and wipe away my tears." —Chicago Sun-Times
"Bursting with humor and insight." —USA Today Expand reviews