A cheerful, honest, compassionate, and witty story spanning one impossible week in Hank Devereaux’s life. Reluctantly—and against his own nature—William Henry Devereaux Jr., who prefers to be called Hank, runs the English department at a run-down college somewhere in the rusty belt of Pennsylvania. Hank himself is, by nature, observant and an anarchist, but the department is collapsing rapidly even without his efforts. Over the course of a week, Hank must go through a mass of trials and even catastrophes: a furious colleague will break his nose; a graduate student will try to seduce him; on local TV he’ll be accused of executing a goose; his own father will arrive wanting to reconcile forever; and some body functions suddenly declare a strike. A sad and funny novel about academic failures, about freedom—not-freedom—and, simply, about good people. Richard Russo is the author of seven novels, winner of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for “Empire Falls,” later adapted into a TV series by HBO. The novel “Straight Man” was translated into Russian by Lyubov Summ, a translator of G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, Jonathan Franzen, Salman Rushdie, and many others.