Realist fiction heavyweight Richard Russo is in town tonight, reading from his new book, Bridge of Sighs. In last week’s paper, Alison Hallett said it’s “a sprawling, warm blanket of a book that, like Russo’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Empire Falls, explores small town values and small town ugliness, the myth of upward mobility, and the importance of carving out a friendly corner of the world.” Russo is a contemporary master of small town writing, and the setting for the new book is Thomaston, NY, just north of Albany. To quote the New Yorker:

It’s a tiny anthill. But the ant’s a centaur in his dragon world (as Pound put it), and dramatic intensity is proportional to its setting. A boy may be falling out of the sky, but whether there is enough macaroni salad at the deli counter is a problem a thousand times more consequential to those who make their living running deli counters. Russo is committed to inventing this sort of problem, the macaroni-salad problem, and then taking it seriously. He is a sentimental, humorous, ruminative, occasionally satirical, and extremely unhurried writer.

Tonight’s reading is one of those new models of moving units: To attend the reading, you must buy the book (at a very generous discount). So it’s $19 to get in, and that gets you a copy of Sighs, which you can presumably get signed afterwards, if that’s your thing. If you like the sound of this, it all happens tonight at the Bagdad, 3702 SE Hawthorne, at 7 pm.