Most Popular Books by Richard Ford

Frank Bascombe, in the aftermath of his divorce and the ruin of his career, has entered an ''Existence Period'' - selling real estate in 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 extraordinary empathy and perception.

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.

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.

Ten “beautifully imagined and crafted stories” of the American West by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Independence Day (Joyce Carol Oates). In these ten exquisite stories, Richard Ford explores the wind-scrubbed landscape of the American West and the guarded hopes and gnawing loneliness of the people who live there: a refugee from justice driving across Wyoming with his daughter and girlfriend in a stolen Mercedes; a boy watching his family dissolve in a night of tragicomic violence; and two men and a woman swapping hard-luck stories in a frontier bar as they try to sweeten their luck. In the tradition of Raymond Carver, Rock Springs is a masterpiece of taut narration, cleanly chiseled prose, and empathy so generous that it feels like a kind of grace. “The finest of these stories achieve luminous moments, moments with potential to change how the reader sees and thinks” (The New York Times Book Review).

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Independence Day and The Sportswriter brings back the unforgettable Frank Bascombe in this astonishing meditation on modern-day America. A sportswriter and a real estate agent, husband and father—Frank Bascombe has been many things to many people. His uncertain youth behind him, we follow him through three days during the autumn of 2000, when his trade as a realtor on the Jersey Shore is thriving. But as a presidential election hangs in the balance, and a post-nuclear-family Thanksgiving looms before him, Frank discovers that what he terms “the Permanent Period” is fraught with unforeseen perils. An astonishing meditation on America today and filled with brilliant insights, The Lay of the Land is a magnificent achievement from one of the most celebrated chroniclers of our time. Also available in the Bascombe Trilogy: The Sportswriter and Independence Day

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.

A quartet of masterful novellas that returns Richard Ford to the territory that sealed his reputation as an American master: the life of Frank Bascombe, hero of his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel Independence Day. Richard Ford introduced the world to his protean literary everyman, Frank Bascombe, aspiring novelist turned sportswriter turned real estate agent, in his 1986 masterpiece The Sportswriter. A lapidary account of the textures, sorrows and pleasures of one man’s ordinary life, it laid the groundwork for the Pulitzer Prize–winning Independence Day, published in 1996, followed by the last novel in the Bascombe trilogy, The Lay of the Land, published in 2006. Over a period of twenty years, the Bascombe novels deepened a portrait of one of the most unforgettable characters in American fiction, and in so doing gave readers an indelible portrait of America. Now in Let Me Be Frank With You, Ford returns to the territory that established him as an Updike for the contemporary era, in a quartet of novella-length Bascombe stories, set in in the aftermath and amid the calamitous circumstances of Hurricane Sandy. Of revisiting Bascombe, Ford says, “What draws me to writing Frank Bascombe is what’s always drawn me: he’s funny (and it’s thrilling to write things that are funny), but also he offers me the chance to write into the breach between what Henry James calls ‘bliss and bale’; in my own way, to connect ‘the things that help and the things that hurt’ and to find some kind of reconciling vocabulary for both. I always think that, when I’m writing Frank Bascombe, I have the chance to write about the most important things I know, and that’s always been irresistible.” A moving, peerlessly funny odyssey through America and through the layered consciousness of one of its most compelling literary incarnations, the four stories in Let Me Be Frank With You bear Bascombe’s unmistakable and now-famous imprint: a comic sensibility at odds with the minutiae of everyday human dismay and bewilderment; a plain-spoken acuity penetrating and expressing the shared wonder of modern existence; and a mordant relish and caution for all things American.

Robard Hewes has driven across the country in search of a woman named Buena who, twelve years ago, infused him with a feeling that has now turned into obsession. Sam Newel has travelled from Chicago seeking the missing piece of himself. They both find themselves on an uncharted hunting island in the Mississippi owned by an old man named Lamb. When these men converge on this strange land, each discovers the thing he''s looking for yet triggers a conflagration of inevitable violence in this tense and brutal yet moving tale.

First, I''ll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later.It was more bad instincts and bad luck that lead to Dell Parsons'' parents robbing a bank. They weren''t reckless people, but in an instant, their actions alter fifteen-year-old Dell''s sense of normal life forever. In the days that follow, he is saved before the authorities think to arrive. Driving across Montana, his life hurtles towards the unknown; a hotel in a deserted town, the violent and enigmatic Arthur Remlinger, and towards Canada itself. But, as Dell discovers, in this new world of secrets and upheaval, he is not the only one whose past lies on the other side of the border.

A landmark new collection of stories from Richard Ford that showcases his brilliance, sensitivity, and trademark wit and candor In Sorry for Your Trouble, Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times-bestselling author Richard Ford enacts a stunning meditation on memory, love and loss. “Displaced” returns us to a young man’s Mississippi adolescence, and to a shocking encounter with a young Irish immigrant who recklessly tries to solace the narrator’s sorrow after his father’s death. “Driving Up” follows an American woman’s late-in-life journey to Canada to bid good-bye to a lost love now facing the end of this life. “The Run of Yourself,” a novella, sees a New Orleans lawyer navigating the difficulties of living beyond his Irish wife’s death. And “Nothing to Declare” follows a man and a woman’s chance re-meeting in the New Orleans French Quarter, after twenty years, and their discovery of what’s left of love for them. Typically rich with Ford’s emotional lucidity and lyrical precision, Sorry for Your Trouble is a memorable collection from one of our greatest writers.

The landscape of Women with Men ranges from the northern plains of Montana to the streets of Paris and the suburbs of Chicago. The tragedies that stalk the characters are unfolded with an indelible wit and clarity. So merciless is Ford''s lingering gaze upon human, mostly male, weakness, so understanding his eye for the unravelling threads of human love, that this collection of novellas seems only to broaden the reputation and the following of one of the outstanding writers of our time.

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

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.

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.

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Gatherings from Spain" by Richard Ford. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

Sportjournalisten är den första boken i Richard Fords hyllade Bascombe-trilogi som sedan följdes av Självständighetsdagen och Som landet ligger. Här får vi för första gången möta den amerikanske antihjälten Frank Bascombe. Han är en frånskild sportjournalist som bor i en av New Yorks trygga förorter, älskar sina barn och spenderar sina dagar med att studera människor. Men livet blev inte riktigt som han hade tänkt sig. Han lider av hjärtklappning och dagdrömmar, hans karriär går inte riktigt så bra som han skulle önska. Vi får följa Frank under en påskhelg med hans nya älskarinna då allting sakta drivs till sin spets och han tvingas rannsaka sitt liv på allvar. Sportjournalisten är en gripande, stark och skarpsynt roman om det moderna USA, ensamhetens konsekvenser och kärlekens villkor. En stor roman som många kommer att känna igen sig i.

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.

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Independence Day and The Sportswriter comes a novel of menace and eroticism set in Oaxaca, Mexico. • "His prose has a taut, cinematic quality that bathes his story with the same hot, mercilessly white light that scorches Mexico." —The New York Times Book Review In this novel, Richard Ford updates the tradition of Conrad for the age of cocaine smuggling. Harry Quinn has come to free his girlfriend''s brother, Sonny, from jail and, ideally, to get him away form the suavely sadistic drug dealer who suspects Sonny of having cheated him.

This book stands out from the crowd in providing a fresh original perspective on the relatively underexplored area of a leader''s reputation. Reputation is a consequence of everything you say or do; no other tangible or intangible asset is worth as much as your reputation or has such a positive or detrimental impact on your career. Many studies reveal that we care more about what other people think about us than we do about what may have actually happened in reality, and yet there is so little written about the subject. This book gets to grips with how our reputation is formed in the real world and what really makes the difference in winning and losing a good reputation. The book uncovers the impact of the ''secret vocabulary'' used in organizations to shape reputations, and offers tips and advice about how to manage your reputation and how to develop a personal brand to shape your future career direction with integrity and authenticity. Dr Richard Ford is one of the UK''s leading leadership coaching and assessment psychologists who has helped hundreds of senior and potential leaders develop successful careers, and now Dr Ford shares 35 years of learning to help you achieve career success.