Richard Ford

A 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,...

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....

Hailed as a major American novel, Independence Day is a relentlessly thoughtful, heart-wrenching, yet hilarious portrait of an ordinary American man. Wickedly realistic details and dialog entice you to see modern life filtered through the first-person narrator's complex and evolving consciousness. Apparently directionless since his divorce, Frank Bascombe migrates from one non-committal relationship to another. He freely indulges his tendencies to...

In this “powerful” blockbuster of a novel (The New York Times), the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Independence Day introduces his most beloved character, failed novelist turned sportswriter Frank Bascombe, during an Easter weekend, as he moves through the great losses of his life. 

As a sportswriter, Frank Bascombe makes his living studying people—men, mostly—who live entirely within themselves....

At the beginning of his career, a young man gives up his chance to become a successful novelist in order to work as a sportswriter.

In these ten exquisite stories, first published by Atlantic Monthly Press in 1987 and reissued as a Grove Press paperback, 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: a refugee from justice driving across Wyoming with his daughter and an unhappy girlfriend in a stolen, cranberry-colored Mercedes; a boy watching his family dissolve...