Books by Richard Ford

Journey to 19th-century Spain through the insightful letters of Richard Ford. "The Letters of Richard Ford, 1797-1858" offers a unique window into British history and travel writing of the era. Ford''s correspondence provides a firsthand account of life, culture, and landscapes, revealing his experiences and observations. This meticulously prepared edition allows readers to delve into the personal reflections and perspectives of a keen observer, as Ford''s letters paint a vivid portrait of Spain. Explore historical events and cultural nuances through Ford''s articulate and engaging prose. A valuable resource for those interested in biography, European history, and the allure of travel, this collection provides a fascinating glimpse into the past. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Over the course of four celebrated works of fiction and almost forty years, Richard Ford has crafted an ambitious, incisive and singular view of American life as lived. Unconstrained, astute, provocative, often laugh-out-loud funny, Frank Bascombe is once more our guide to the great American midway. Now in the twilight of life, a man who has occupied many colourful roles—sportswriter, father, husband, ex-husband, friend, real estate agent—Bascombe finds himself in the most sorrowing role of all: caregiver to his son, Paul, diagnosed with ALS. On a shared winter odyssey to Mount Rushmore, Frank, in typical Bascombe fashion, faces down the mortality that is assured each of us, and in doing so confronts what happiness might signify at the end of days. In this memorable novel, Richard Ford puts on display the prose, wit and intelligence that make him one of our most acclaimed living writers. Be Mine is a profound, funny, poignant love letter to our beleaguered world.

''The god of small stories ... A set of polished gems from a master craftsman'' Sunday Times''He writes about human beings and their disappointments with unfailing insight'' Observer''Finely crafted'' Mail on Sunday''American master'' Daily TelegraphA woman and man, parted a quarter of a century, reunite in a bar in New Orleans as the St Patrick''s Day parade goes by. A divorced suburban dad helps his daughter pick out a card for her friend who''s moving away. A group of friends in late middle age, all once promising, reunite for dinner when one of their number loses her husband, but the gathering splinters when bitter revelations about their shared past emerge. Two teenage boys sit in a drive-in, the air thick with the scent of gin and popcorn and longing. A visionary collection of luminous landscapes, of great moments in small lives, of the people we carry with us long after they are gone, Sorry for Your Trouble takes disappointment, ageing, grief, love and marriage and silhouettes them against the heady backdrop of Irish America in the past and present. Earthily humane and profoundly wise, the collection reconfirms its author as the master of contemporary American fiction.

From American master Richard Ford, a memoir: his first work of nonfiction, a stirring narrative of memory and parental love How is it that we come to consider our parents as people with rich and intense lives that include but also exclude us? Richard Ford’s parents—Edna, a feisty, pretty Catholic-school girl with a difficult past; and Parker, a sweet-natured, soft-spoken traveling salesman—were rural Arkansans born at the turn of the twentieth century. Married in 1928, they lived “alone together” on the road, traveling throughout the South. Eventually they had one child, born late, in 1944. For Ford, the questions of what his parents dreamed of, how they loved each other and loved him become a striking portrait of American life in the mid-century. Between Them is his vivid image of where his life began and where his parents’ lives found their greatest satisfaction. Bringing his celebrated candor, wit, and intelligence to this most intimate and mysterious of landscapes—our parents’ lives—the award-winning storyteller and creator of the iconic Frank Bascombe delivers an unforgettable exploration of memory, intimacy, and love.

A brilliant new work that returns Richard Ford to the hallowed territory that sealed his reputation as an American master: the world of Frank Bascombe, and the landscape of his celebrated novels The Sportswriter, the Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner winning Independence Day, and The Lay of the Land. In his trio of world-acclaimed novels portraying the life of an entire American generation, Richard Ford has imagined one of the most indelible and widely discussed characters in modern literature, Frank Bascombe. Through Bascombe—protean, funny, profane, wise, often inappropriate—we''ve witnessed the aspirations, sorrows, longings, achievements and failings of an American life in the twilight of the twentieth century. Now, in Let Me Be Frank with You, Ford reinvents Bascombe in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. In four richly luminous narratives, Bascombe (and Ford) attempts to reconcile, interpret and console a world undone by calamity. It is a moving and wondrous and extremely funny odyssey through the America we live in at this moment. Ford is here again working with the maturity and brilliance of a writer at the absolute height of his powers.

In these ten exquisite stories, Richard Ford mines literary gold from the wind-scrubbed landscape of the American West--and from the guarded hopes and gnawing loneliness of the people who live there. "Rock Springs" is a masterpiece of taut narration, cleanly chiseled prose, and empathy so generous that it feels like a kind of grace.

With The Sportswriter, in 1985, Richard Ford began a cycle of novels that ten years later – after Independence Day won both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award – was hailed by The Times of London as “an extraordinary epic [that] is nothing less than the story of the twentieth century itself.” Frank Bascombe’s story resumes, in the fall of 2000, with the presidential election still hanging in the balance and Thanksgiving looming before him with all the perils of a post-nuclear family get-together. He’s now plying his trade as a realtor on the Jersey shore and contending with health, marital and familial issues that have his full attention: “all the ways that life seems like life at age fifty-five strewn around me like poppies.” Richard Ford’s first novel in over a decade: the funniest, most engaging (and explosive) book he’s written, and a major literary event.

In his second collection of short fiction, Richard Ford captures relationships at complex and essential moments of truth — exploring the obscure difference between privacy and intimacy, the fine distinction of pleasing another as opposed to oneself, and the need for reliance tempered by fearful vulnerability. The three stories take us from the plains of Montana, to the streets of Paris, to the suburbs of Chicago.

Only a storyteller as agile as Richard Ford could produce stories so rich and diverse on a single grand theme -- love, intimacy and their dramatic failures. With felicity, humour, insight and painful candour, A Multitude of Sins exposes our failure to be sincere, empathetic, patient, honest, passionate -- ultimately, to be loving -- to those we desire or should merely care for. In this fine collection, human relations, indeed our entire sense of right and wrong, are put into vivid and unforgettable play.

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • PEN/FAULKNER AWARD WINNER • INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • From one of his generation’s greatest writers comes the sequel to The Sportswriter, starring Frank Bascombe, who “has earned a place beside Willy Loman and Harry Angstrom in our literary landscape ... with a wry wit and a fin de siècle wisdom that is very much his own” (The New York Times Book Review). Frank Bascombe, in the aftermath of his divorce and the ruin of his career, has entered an "Existence Period," selling real estate in Haddam, New Jersey, and mastering the high-wire act of normalcy. But over one Fourth of July weekend, Frank is called into sudden, bewildering engagement with life. Independence Day is a moving, peerlessly funny odyssey through America and through the layered consciousness of one of its most compelling literary incarnations, conducted by a novelist of astonishing empathy and perception.

A novel of a fracturing family in 1960 Montana, "full of prose that makes the reader shiver," by the New York Times-bestselling author of Rock Springs ( Chicago Sun-Times). When Joe Brinson was sixteen, his father moved the family to Great Falls, Montana. But the new start didn''t go quite as planned. Jerry Brinson is a golf pro to rich country club members, but then loses the job. In reaction, he joins a firefighting crew working in the mountains—as his wife becomes entangled in an affair with one of the businessmen from the club. Told from the point of view of Joe as a grown man looking back on those days in 1960, Wildlife is a "heartbreaking and compelling" novel about love, family, and the forces that test them to the breaking point by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Canada and The Sportswriter ( Philadelphia Inquirer). The basis for a film starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Carey Mulligan, Wildlife is "a wise, humane, and disarmingly simple novel of domestic distress" ( Entertainment Weekly). "There is at the heart of this novel a deep nostalgia for that moment when a person recognizes a true perfection in the way things once were, before the onset of ruin and great change."— The New York Times Book Review

A trilogy of brilliant novels—The Sportswriter, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Independence Day, and The Lay of the Land—that charts the life and times of Frank Bascombe, one of the most beloved and enduring characters in modern fiction. When we meet Frank Bascombe in The Sportswriter, his unguarded voice instantly wins us over and pulls us into a life that has been irrevocably changed—by the loss of a marriage, a career, a child. We then follow Frank, ever laconic and observant, through Independence Day and The Lay of the Land, witnessing his fortune’s rise and his family’s fragmentation. With finely honed prose and an eye that captures the most subtle nuances of the human condition—all its pathos and beauty and strangeness—Ford transforms this ordinary man’s life into a riveting, moving parable of life in America today.

Richard Ford, one of the finest American novelists and short-story writers, introduced the first Granta Book of the American Short Story, which Granta Books published in 1992. It became the definitive anthology of American short fiction written in the last half of the twentieth century. In the fourteen years since, Ford has been reading new stories and rereading old ones and selecting new favourites. This new collection, again of more than forty writers, expands Ford''s original choice to include stories that he regretted overlooking first time around as well as many by a new generation of writers, among them Sherman Alexie, Junot Diaz, Deborah Eisenberg, Nell Freudenberg, Matt Klam, Jhumpa Lahiri and Z. Z. Packer. None of the stories (though a few of the writers) was in the first volume. Published to critical acclaim in hardback in 2007, this book is an essential companion volume to the first collection.

Frank Bascombe has a younger girlfriend and a job as a sportswriter. To many men of his age, thirty-eight, this would be a cause for optimism, yet Frank feels the pull of his inner despair and especially of his recent losses - his preferred career has ended, his wife has divorced him, and a tragic accident took his elder son. In the course of this Easter weekend, Frank will lose all the remnants of his familiar life, though he will emerge heroic with spirits soaring. This is a magnificent novel that propelled Richard Ford into the first rank of American writers.

An introduction to the work of Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Ford includes excerpts from the novels The Sportswriter, Independence Day, and Piece of My Heart; "Communist," "Reunion," "Calling," and other short fiction; and the memoir "My Mother, in Memory." Original. 25,000 first printing.

Harry Quinn and his lover, Rae, plan to spring Rae''s brother from jail in Oaxaca, in this irresistible and elegantly spare novel of love and violence.

Contains mostly first (some second) editions of selected works by Richard Ford.

The “extraordinary” debut novel (Newsweek) from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Independence Day tells the story of two godless pilgrims who converge on an uncharted island in the Mississippi. • “One of those books that hit you hard." —Houston Chronicle Robard Hewes has driven across the country in the service of a destructive passion. Sam Newell is seeking the missing piece of himself. When these men come together, each discovers the thing he''s looking for—amid a conflagration of violence that''s as shocking as it is inevitable.

Richard Ford graduated from Michigan State University in 1966 with a degree in English. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1977, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1978, and won the 1994 Rea Award for the Short Story. "Independence day" was the winner of both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1996. Originally from Mississippi, he now resides with his wife in New Orleans. In addition to his novels "Independence day" and "The Sportswriter," (the prequel to "Independence day"), Ford has written "Lay of the land," "A Piece of my heart," "The Ultimate good luck," and "Wildlife," as well as numerous short stories which are collected in "Rock springs" and "Women with men." The collection is arranged into five series. Series I contains professional and personal correspondence. Series II contains notes, articles and essays, screenplays, short stories, novels, non-fictions work and events in which Richard Ford used his writings. Within each portion of Series II are holographic copies, typescript drafts and published formats of Richard Ford''s works. Series III includes writings that are written about Ford, such as interviews and reviews. Series IV holds works Ford collected by other writers. Series V is a small collection of Ford''s personal memorabilia.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.