Women with Men - (Vintage Contemporaries) by Richard Ford (Paperback)

About the Book

In his first volume of short fiction since the acclaimed "Rock Springs", Ford creates a portrait gallery of male characters who are as wounded, as rueful, and a touchingly vulnerable as Frank Bascombe, the protagonist of his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, "Independence Day".

Book Synopsis

The "Babe Ruth of novelists" (The Washington Post Book World)--and the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Independence Day--reaffirms his mastery of the short story as he takes us from the plains of Montana to the streets of Paris and the suburbs of Chicago to explore the consolations and complications that arise through our experiences of passion, romance and love.

Richard Ford's Independence Day--his sequel to The Sportswriter, and an international bestseller--is the only novel ever to have received both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Now, with Women With Men, he reaffirms his mastery of shorter fiction with his first collection since the widely acclaimed Rock Springs, published a decade ago.

The landscape of Women with Men ranges from the northern plains of Montana to the streets of Paris and the suburbs of Chicago, where Mr. Ford's various characters experience the consolations and complications that prevail in matters of passion, romance and love. A seventeen-year-old boy starting adulthood in the shadow of his parents' estrangement, a survivor of three marriages now struggling with cancer, an ostensibly devoted salesman in early middle age, an aspiring writer, a woman scandalously betrayed by her husband--they each of them contend with the vast distances that exist between those who are closest together. Whether alone, long married or newly met, they confront the obscure difference between privacy and intimacy, the fine distinction of pleasing another as opposed to oneself, and a need for reliance that is tempered by fearful vulnerability.

In three long stories, Richard Ford captures men and women at this complex and essential moment of truth--in the course of everyday life, or during a bleak Thanksgiving journey, seismic arguments, Christmas abroad, the sudden disappearance of a child, even a barroom shooting. And with peerless emotional nuance and authority he once again demonstrates, as Elizabeth Hardwick has written, "a talent as strong and varied as American fiction has to offer."

Review Quotes

"Superb.... Nobody now writing looks more like an American classic." --The New York Times Book Review

"Breathtaking." --The Boston Globe

"Richard Ford is a born storyteller with an inimitable lyric voice." --Joyce Carol Oates

"A Babe Ruth of novelists.... One of the finest curators of the great American living museum." --The Washington Post Book World

"One of his generation's most eloquent voices." --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

About the Author

RICHARD FORD is the author of six novels and three collections of stories. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Independence Day and the PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in short fiction. Ford's best known titles are The Sportswriter, Independence Day, The Lay of the Land, and Let Me Be Frank with You.