The Whore's Child: Stories

Richard Russo

Oct 2011 · Penguin Random House Audio · Narrated by Various

About this audiobook

To this irresistible debut collection of short stories, Richard Russo brings the same bittersweet wit, deep knowledge of human nature, and spellbinding narrative gifts that distinguish his best-selling novels. His themes are the imperfect bargains of marriage; the discoveries and disillusionments of childhood;the unwinnable battles men and women insist on fighting with the past.

A cynical Hollywood moviemaker confronts his dead wife’s lover and abruptly realizes the depth of his own passion. As his parents’ marriage disintegrates, a precocious fifth-grader distracts himself with meditations on baseball, spaghetti, and his place in the universe. And in the title story, an elderly nun enters a college creative writing class and plays havoc with its tidy notions of fact and fiction. The Whore’s Child is further proof that Russo is one of the finest writers we have, unsparingly truthful yet hugely compassionate.


“The Whore’s Child,” read by Mark Bramhall
“Monhegan Light,” read by Robertson Dean
“The Farther You Go,” read by Arthur Morey
“Joy Ride,” read by Lincoln Hoppe
“Buoyancy,” read by Stefan Rudnicki
“Poison,” read by Fred Sanders
“The Mysteries of Linwood Hart,” read by John Rubinstein

About the author

RICHARD RUSSO is the author of nine novels, most recently Chances Are..., 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 into a multiple-award-winning miniseries; in 2017, he received France’s Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine. He lives in Port­land, Maine.