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Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Richard Russo made his name with gritty stories of small-town, working-class guys and their families making do, getting by — in “Nobody’s Fool,” “Empire Falls,” “Bridge of Sighs.”

His new novel sets the drama against summer vacations on Cape Cod — and sets a midlife search for happiness against the baggage handed down from parents.

The Cape is always there, waiting. And so are the shadows of mom and dad.

This hour, Richard Russo and his new novel, “That Old Cape Magic.”

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Richard Russo joins us in our studio. He’s the author of six previous novels, including “Mohawk,” “Nobody’s Fool,” “Straight Man,” “Empire Falls,” which won the Pulitzer Prize, and “Bridge of Sighs.” His most recent is “That Old Cape Magic.” You can read an excerpt here.

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High-drama Southern novelist Pat Conroy has been breaking sales records and breaking hearts for decades with his passionate prose out of the Carolina low country.

With blockbusters gone to film — “The Prince of Tides,” “The Great Santini,” and more — Conroy has won a readership of millions. He aims straight for the emotional heart of every story. The Washington Post calls him “the Prince of Tears.”

Now, after a 14-year break, he’s out with a new novel, set in Charleston: “South of Broad.”

This hour, On Point: A conversation with novelist Pat Conroy.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Pat Conroy joins us from Birmingham, Alabama. He’s the author of the novels “The Great Santini,” “The Lords of Discipline,” “The Prince of Tides,” and others. His new novel is “South of Broad.” You can read excerpts at RandomHouse.com.

Elizabeth Strout

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Elizabeth Strout just won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for a linked set of thirteen stories set on the coast of Maine. Small town stories. Intimate stories.

But don’t look here for lighthouses and quaint charm — for Lake Wobegon with lobsters.

Strout’s big, blunt heroine and the book’s namesake, Olive Kitteridge, is tough, wounded, wounding. She’s a force of nature — and nature creates and destroys. And endures, here in the face of infidelity, suicide, hostage-taking and life’s bewilderment.

This hour, On Point: Pulitzer Prize-winner Elizabeth Strout and “Olive Kitteridge.”

You can join the conversation. Have you read it? What did you learn from Olive Kitteridge? What can we learn from these stories of small-town interconnectedness? In our go-go-go fast-paced global world, how important is it to know our neighbors? Our community? Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Elizabeth Strout won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in fiction for her latest book, “Olive Kitteridge.” Previous works include “Abide with Me” and “Amy and Isabelle.” She is on the faculty of the MFA program at Queens University in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Read an excerpt from “Olive Kitteridge.”

T. C. Boyle. (Photo: Spencer Boyle.)

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American architect, and legend, Frank Lloyd Wright loved fame, followers and women. American novelist and short-story writer T.C. Boyle is no stranger to the limelight himself, or to the stories of larger-than-life American figures.

Now, T.C. Boyle has taken on Frank Lloyd Wright’s tempestuous love life in a novel called “The Women.” If Wright’s famed Prairie Style houses were cool and serene, his love life was anything but — up to and including axe-murder and fire.

This hour, On Point: Novelist T.C. Boyle on Frank Lloyd Wright and “The Women.”

You can join the conversation. Are you a Wright fan? A Boyle fan? What do you expect when these two showmen get together? Falling water? Taliesin? The Guggenheim? The fires behind them?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

T.C. Boyle joins us in our studio. He’s the bestselling author of 20 books of fiction, both novels and short stories. His historical fiction has looked at John Harvey Kellogg in “The Road to Wellville” and sex researcher Alfred Kinsey in “The Inner Circle.” His new novel, about Frank Lloyd Wright, is “The Women.”

Read an excerpt from “The Women” at Boyle’s website.

In southwestern Wisconsin there is an area roughly one hundred and sixty miles long and seventy miles wide with unique features. Its rugged terrain differs from the rest of the state. The last of the Pleistocene glaciers did not trample through this area, and the glacial deposits of rock, clay, sand, and silt-called drift-are missing. Hence its name, the Driftless Region. Singularly unrefined, it endured in its hilly, primitive form, untouched by the shaping hands of those cold giants.

As the glacial herd inched around the Driftless Region, it became an island surrounded by a sea of receding ice. There, plant spores and pollen, frozen for tens of thousands of years, regained their ability to grow. Moss fastened to the back of rocks. Birds and other creatures carried in seeds, which sprouted, rooted, and prospered. Hardwoods and evergreens rose into the sky, with warmth-loving tree tribes settling on southern hillsides and cold-loving tribes on northern slopes.

Rivers and streams-draining fields for the glaciers and migratory paths for animals-poured into the Mississippi River valley. The waters rushed thick with salmon, red trout, and pike, which in turn attracted osprey, heron, otter, mink, and others who lived by fishing. In time, larger animals moved in, including bear, woolly mammoth, giant sloth, saber-toothed tiger, mountain lion, and a two-hundred-pound species of beaver. (The name Wisconsin is believed by some to be a derivation of the word Wishkonsing, place of the beaver.)

With the wildlife came humans, and for thousands of years people about whom there can now be only speculation conducted civilization from those ancient woods. The summer camp of the Singing People was once located in the Driftless.

The first Europeans to arrive were trappers, hunters, and berry pickers-men who lived much as the people who were already there, often mating and living with them. In time, trading posts sprung up along the larger rivers, attracting more trappers and hunters. Rafts piled high with furs floated downstream, until the supply of cash animals was nearly exhausted.

Then a larger wave of immigrants came, displacing the frequently moving trappers, hunters, and foragers. Trading posts gave way to forts, farms, and villages.

The new arrivals, almost without exception, came in search of homesteads. Families as numerous as church mice rode in wagons on wheels with wooden spokes pulled by oxen and mules, dreaming of Property. When they arrived, they climbed out of their wagons, sharpened their axes, and moved into the Driftless to harvest a ripe and waiting crop: timber. Logging roads and lumber mills invaded the hills, and within a single generation the Driftless forests-like the rest of Wisconsin’s virgin oak, pine, and maple-were cut, floated downstream, and made into railroad ties and charcoal.

After the settlers cut down the trees and dug up all the lead and gold they could find, many abandoned the Driftless in search of flatter, richer farming. Those who remained were generally the more stubborn agriculturists, eking a living from small farms perched on the sides of eroded hills. Like the Badger State totem that burrows in the ground for both residence and defense, they refused to leave. For better or worse, their roots ran deep.

Small villages blossomed with schools, post offices, and implement dealers; dairy and grain cooperatives; hardware, fabric, and grocery stores; filling stations, banks, libraries, and taverns. And the Driftless farmers moved into these villages after their bodies wore out. Old men and women sat on porches in work clothes faded by the sun and softened by innumerable washings to resemble pajamas. They talked in whispers, shelling hazelnuts into wooden bowls, telling stories, endless stories, about long ago.

The young people listened but were skeptical. It didn’t seem possible for men and women to do the things described in those stories: people didn’t act like that.

“They don’t now,” the old people complained.

It was impossible to explain how in those days, in earlier times, in the past, there really were giants-people who did things, good things, odd things, that others would never do. Those giants were at the heart of everything. Nothing could have been the way it was without them, but how could anyone explain them after they were gone?

Over the years, most of the Driftless villages grew into towns and cities. Other villages, however, grew up like most other living things, reached a certain size and just stayed there. Still others, like Words, Wisconsin-a cluster of buildings and homes in a heavily wooded valley-noticeably shrank in size, and entered the twenty-first century smaller than years before.

To get to Words you must first find where Highway 47 and County Trunk Q intersect, at a high, lonely place surrounded by alfalfa, corn, and soybean fields. The four-way stop suggests a hub of some importance, yet there are no other indications of where you are. This lack of posted information can be partly explained by the constraining budget of the Thistlewaite County Highway Commission and partly by the assumption of its rural members: people already know where they are. No provisions are made for those living without a plan.

Still, there is some mystery why a four-way stop should be placed here, impeding the flow of mostly nonexistent traffic. Grange, for instance, with a population of five thousand by far the largest town in the area, has a justifiable need for four-way stops and even several stoplights; but Grange is fifteen miles to the east on 47.

Red Plain, to the west, has grocery, feed, and dime stores, a gas station, a grain elevator, four taverns, and one stop sign on a highway that connects after sixty miles to the interstate.

Heading south on Q does not take you directly anywhere, but for those knowing the roads this is eventually the shortest route to Luster.

Eight miles north of the intersection, the unincorporated village of Words has no traffic signs at all. County Trunk Q is the only way into the tiny town, which sits at the dead end of a steep valley. Few people go there. State maps no longer include Words, and though Q is often pictured, the curving black line simply ends like a snipped-off black thread in a spot of empty white space. Even in Grange, most people don’t know where Words is.

Excerpt from “Driftless” by David Rhodes (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2008). Copyright © 2008 by David Rhodes. Used with permission. All rights reserved.

Back to “Novelist David Rhodes”

Writer David Rhodes published three novels still in his twenties, was hailed as one of the best of his generation, was paralyzed in a flash, in a motorcycle accident, and dropped off the map for thirty years — living simply, quietly, almost invisibly in the rolling countryside of rural Wisconsin.

Three years ago, a young fan tracked him down. Discovered he was still writing. And brought him back.

His extraordinary new novel, “Driftless,” takes us deep into the lives and hollows of the world he has quietly observed, off the map, for decades. This hour, On Point: novelist David Rhodes and “Driftless.”

You can join the conversation. Can you imagine coming back after more than three decades of silence, and hard times, with a masterpiece? Share your thoughts.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

David Rhodes joins us from Madison, Wisconsin. His books include “The Last Fair Deal Going Down” (1972), “The Easter Home” (1974), and “Rock Island Line” (1975). In 1977, he was paralyzed from the waist down as the result of a motorcycle accident. His critically acclaimed new novel is “Driftless.”

Read an excerpt from “Driftless.”

More links:

Poets & Writers magazine profiles Rhodes in its September/October issue, and offers capsule summaries of his novels and photos from the rural backroads near Wonewoc, Wisconsin, where Rhodes lives.

Uwem Akpan (Photo: Comfort Ukpong, Little, Brown & Company)

The news from Africa can sound as old and hard as time.

But what if you were a child, in the midst of it? In the midst of loving and hoping, and seeing and growing up … and living fresh through hunger and killing, genocide in your parents’ bedroom, glue-sniffing with your mom on Christmas Day.

Nigerian writer and Jesuit priest Uwem Akpan’s new short story collection brings us Africa, shatteringly, through the eyes of children facing slavery, fear, death. It is a revelation.

This hour, On Point: A new voice from Africa. Uwem Akpan and “Say You’re One of Them.”

-Tom Ashbrook

* * *

Guest:

Uwem Akpan, Nigerian-born writer, author of the new short story collection “Say You’re One of Them.” You can read and listen to an excerpt from the book at NPR.org. And you can listen to the song “Agbalagba,” by Grammy Award-winning world music star Angelique Kidjo, inspired by “Say You’re One of Them.”

What is it about vampires? Halloween is still five weeks away, and already the fake fangy teeth are in the drug store aisles, along with the little kits for applying trickles of blood.

Some ladies and gentlemen and children of all ages cannot seem to get enough of the neck-nuzzling, blood-sucking world of Dracula. Book publishers love it. B-movies and TV love it. The goth world loves it.

Eric Nuzum has traveled from Bram Stoker’s gothic England to exploding graves to Transylvania on the dark and wacky trail of vampire love across the centuries.

This hour On Point: stalking the cult of the vampire.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Eric Nuzum, author of “The Dead Travel Fast: Stalking Vampires From Nosferatu to Count Chocula,” is a pop culture critic and director of programming and acquisitions for NPR.

Elizabeth Miller, author of “A Dracula Handbook” and “Reflections on Dracula,” is professor emeritus of English at Memorial University of Newfoundland.

Nicolae Paduraru, president of the Transylvanian Society of Dracula in Romania, guide for Mysterious Journeys tours, and former Tourism Ministry official.