• For Your Consideration:
• From 1987: A First Edition, First Printing in HARDCOVER in VG+ Condition of:
• “ROCK SPRINGS: STORIES”
(Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987) (Hardcover, First Edition)
• BY RICHARD FORD
• “Every sentence FORD writes illuminates….”
—SUNDAY TIMES (UK)
• “Beautifully imagined and crafted stories, by turns heartrending and wickedly funny, and just plain wicked. RICHARD FORD is a born storyteller with an inimitable lyric voice, and ROCK SPRINGS is the very poetry of realism.”
—JOYCE CAROL OATES
•
• For other details about this book, please see below.
•
TITLE: “ROCK SPRINGS: Stories”
AUTHOR: RICHARD FORD
TYPE: HARDCOVER
PAGES: 235
PUBLISHER, LOCALE, & YEAR: Atlantic Monthly Press (New York), 1987
NOTE: This copy is NOT ex-library NOR a book-club edition.
ISBN: 0-87113-159-5
CONDITION OF DUST JACKET: VERY GOOD PLUS.
Price (17.95) is unclipped. Corners & spine tips bumped. Light scratching & smudging on sides; all else, clean & bright. (Now protected in a Brodart archival cover.)
CONDITION of BOOK ITSELF: VERY GOOD PLUS.
Book is square. Boards are clean with faint sharp corners & bumped spine tips. Spine is tight—and uncreased. Light shelf-wear along edges. Text-block edges & endpapers are fine. Pages are bright & clean—with no writing, no doodling, no tears, no stains, no foxing, etc.
••• SHIPPING NEWS: This book will be wrapped with care before being shipped in a cushioned and sturdy box. THANK YOU!
• “The most beautiful book of fiction I’ve read this year.... The narrative power, the intelligence behind these stories, is formidable.”
—CAROLYN SEE, LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK REVIEW
• “The first thing that needs to be said about this collection of stories by the author of THE SPORTSWRITER—a novel that received considerable recognition as one of the best of 1986—is that the finest of them achieve luminous moments, moments with potential to change how the reader sees and thinks.”
—JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN, NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
• “These stories elevate RICHARD FORD to the small group of great living American storytellers. With great strength and tragic grace, RICHARD FORD will shoot an arrow through your heart.”
—DENVER POST
• “RICHARD FORD is an enormously versatile writer, a perfect ventriloquist who achieves his end in voices that vary from swamp-deep to mirror-flat…. ROCK SPRINGS is cause for celebration.”
—VILLAGE VOICE LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
• “A collection of brilliantly carved short stories, reminiscent of the brilliance of RAYMOND CARVER. Astute, poetical and realistic, a thread weaves through the ten different stories, unifying them with the grand luster of trivialities of everyday life.”
—FUZZY RANTS (BLOG)
• “ROCK SPRINGS came out shortly after FORD’s breakthrough novel, THE SPORTSWRITER (1986), though its subject matter seems worlds apart. The stories take place mostly in the Pacific northwest and deal with the kind of drifting young men who hunt, drink and steal and will be just as likely to go to prison as to graduate from high school. THE SPORTSWRITER is set in well-heeled, suburban New Jersey; its protagonist, FRANK BASCOMBE, is a published novelist who works for a Manhattan magazine and owns several homes. In other words, he does not have to worry about the price of a train ticket. And yet both books share a conviction that life is less stable than it first appears to be; that things happen, things you can’t predict or control, though that doesn’t mean your decisions or your character are not revealed by them, or to blame.”
—BENJAMIN MARKOVITS, TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT (UK)
• “Perhaps no story, though, plays back through my head more often than RICHARD FORD’s ‘ROCK SPRINGS’…. It’s an ungainly, unwieldy thing, a close-one-eye-and-it’s-a-mess sort of story, a story that features, of all things, a gold mine standing in for the American Dream. This is something that not only should not work, but should probably not be attempted…. I do very much admire the whole of stories. Don’t get me wrong. But as I think of [‘ROCK SPRINGS’ as one] of those stories I have all but memorized….”
—DREW PERRY, FICTION WRITERS REVIEW
• “ROCK SPRINGS is a classic of dirty realism for a couple of reasons. First, the subject matter – lower middle class and working class people dealing with failing marriages, alcohol abuse, casual violence, sometimes accidental, sometimes not—is representative of the sorts of material writers in this school favor. Second, and more important to me, is the writing style itself—dirty realism stories are told in matter-of-fact language tinged always with irony.”
—THE NEW SOUTHERN GENTLEMAN (BLOG)
• “The stories in this collection read like textbook exercises in classic short story form: in each, a lifetime of sadness is suddenly crystallized around a moment an image, a discovery, a confrontation after which a life has been irrevocably, if at first imperceptibly, changed. FORD approaches the genre with reverent precision and delivers an array of haunting, enduring images….”
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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