Florence Adler Swims Forever
Rachel Beanland, 2020
Simon & Schuster
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781982132460
Summary
Over the course of one summer that begins with a shocking tragedy, three generations of the Adler family grapple with heartbreak, romance, and the weight of family secrets.
Atlantic City, 1934.
Every summer, Esther and Joseph Adler rent their house out to vacationers escaping to "America’s Playground" and move into the small apartment above their bakery.
Despite the cramped quarters, this is the apartment where they raised their two daughters, Fannie and Florence, and it always feels like home.
Now Florence has returned from college, determined to spend the summer training to swim the English Channel, and Fannie, pregnant again after recently losing a baby, is on bedrest for the duration of her pregnancy. After Joseph insists they take in a mysterious young woman whom he recently helped emigrate from Nazi Germany, the apartment is bursting at the seams.
Esther only wants to keep her daughters close and safe but some matters are beyond her control: there’s Fannie’s risky pregnancy—not to mention her always-scheming husband, Isaac—and the fact that the handsome heir of a hotel notorious for its anti-Semitic policies, seems to be in love with Florence.
When tragedy strikes, Esther makes the shocking decision to hide the truth—at least until Fannie’s baby is born—and pulls the family into an elaborate web of secret-keeping and lies, bringing long-buried tensions to the surface that reveal how quickly the act of protecting those we love can turn into betrayal.
Based on a true story and told in the vein of J. Courtney Sullivan’s Saints for All Occasions and Anita Diamant’s The Boston Girl, Beanland’s family saga is a breathtaking portrait of just how far we will go to in order to protect our loved ones and an uplifting portrayal of how the human spirit can endure—and even thrive—after tragedy. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Rachel Beanland is a graduate of the University of South Carolina and earned her MFA in creative writing from Virginia Commonwealth University. She lives with her husband and three children in Richmond, Virginia. Florence Adler Swims Forever is her first novel. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Beanland is particularly good at conjuring… the historical moment… as American Jews try to save relatives in an increasingly untenable Nazi Germany. We see cruel obstacles to immigration, and the growing chasm between European Jews and their increasingly prosperous American counterparts.…The [America] dream is not without costs, and the dreamers are not immune to tragedy.
New York Times Book Review
In less than ten pages, I… allow[ed] Beanland's storytelling ability to overpower me.… What's remarkable is not how quickly the book hooked me, but how it held my attention during and after reading. After spending a pleasant afternoon flying through the first 96 pages, I woke up at 3 a.m. thinking about the plot. I simply couldn't put it out of my head. I finished in two days.… I felt awe.
USA Today
Beanland beautifully handles the depiction of loss and rebuilding life without a loved one, describing moments that are by turns painful and moving. The thick emotional tension will please fans of character-driven historicals.
Publishers Weekly
As the secrets threaten to spill and heartbreak blankets them, the [Adler] family must unite to face a future without Florence.… [A] richly drawn debut family saga based on the story of an ancestor of the author's. —Laura Jones, Indiana State Lib., Indianapolis
Library Journal
The novel's events take place in the shadow of the approaching Holocaust, but the author fails to engage meaningfully with it…. [H]er half-baked approach is an "add-Holocaust-and-stir" effect that lacks emotional verisimilitude.… A unique if occasionally overreaching novel.
Kirkus Reviews
Florence Adler Swims Forever… foreshadows… the coming catastrophe of the Holocaust.… [A] satisfying historical family drama.
BookPage
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points for FLORENCE ADLER SWIMS FOREVER … then take off on your own:
1. "We can’t tell Fannie. Not when the pregnancy is already so precarious." What do you think of the Adler family's decision to keep Florence's death from her sister Fannie? Would you have made the same decision? (Author Rachel Beanland has indicated that she herself is unsure that secrecy was the right choice to have made.)
2. Florence drowns early in the novel. What do we know about her? How does her death continue to haunt each of the Adlers; how does each deal with feelings of grief?
3. Talk about the novel's other characters—as well as the secrets they are keeping from one another. Whose perspective did you enjoy most? Perhaps it's 7-year-old Gussie; if so, how does a child's viewpoint, often naive, end up revealing deep truths.
4. Is Joseph's treatment of Isaac fair: the requirement that he disappear, contacting his little girl only through letters and only twice a year at that?
6. Discuss the growing threat of the holocaust under Nazi Germany as it is foreshadowed in this novel. What are the obstacles thrown in the paths of those who were desperate to emigrate to the U.S? Were you aware of the how difficult it was for European Jews to find refuge in this country? Should some Jewish refugees manage to make it to the U.S., talk about some of the challenges they faced as portrayed in Florence Adler Swims Forever.
7. What is the significance of the novel's title, the idea that Florence will "swim forever"?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)
The Golden Cage
Camilla Lackberg, 2020
Knopf Doubleday
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780525657972
Summary
An exhilarating new novel from a global superstar—a sexy, over-the-top psychological thriller that tells the story of the scorned wife of a billionaire and her delicious plot to get her revenge and bring him to his knees.
Faye has loved Jack since they were students at business school. Jack, the perpetual golden boy, grew up wealthy, unlike Faye, who has worked hard to bury a dark past.
When Jack needs help launching a new company, Faye leaves school to support him, waitressing by day and working as his strategist by night.
With the business soaring, Faye and Jack have a baby, and Faye finds herself at home, caring for their daughter, wealthier than she ever imagined, but more and more removed from the excitement of the business world.
And none of the perks of wealth make up for the fact that Jack has begun to treat her coldly, undermining her intelligence and forgetting all she sacrificed for his success.
When Faye discovers that he's having an affair, the polished façade of their life cracks wide open. Faye is alone, emotionally shattered, and financially devastated—but hell hath no fury like a woman with a violent past bent on vengeance.
Jack is about to get exactly what he deserves—and so much more. In this splashy, electrifying story of sex, betrayal, and secrets, a woman's revenge is a brutal but beautiful thing. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—August 30, 1974
• Where—Fjallbacka, Sweden
• Education—B.A., Gothenburg University
• Awards—People's Literature Award; SKTF Prize for Author of the Year
• Currently—lives in Enskede, Sweden
Camilla Lackberg Eriksson is a Swedish crime writer best know for her 10-volume detective series featuring Patrik Hedstrom and Erica Falck (2003-2017). A TV series based on the two detectives aired beginning in the early 2010s. Overall, Lackberg's works have been translated into more than 40 languages and published in 60 countries.
Background
Lackberg was born in Fjallbacka, Bohuslän, Sweden. After graduating from Gothenburg University with a degree in Economics, she moved to Stockholm, where she worked as an economist before beginning writing fiction seriously. She is a business partner in a jewellery company called Sahara Silver Jewelry AB.
Lackberg first married Micke Eriksson; they divorced in 2007. Under Swedish law, as Lackberg's ex-husband, Eriksson was entitled to half the revenue from the contracts signed during their marriage. Eventually it was agreed that she would pay him a lump sum.
In 2010, Lackberg married Martin Melin, winner of Expedition Robinson. The couple met at a 2005 release party for one of her books and began a working relationship. Melin proposed to Lackberg in August 2009.
In 2015, she became engaged to Simon Sköld, MMA fighter and author.
Lackberg has four children: Wille and Meja from her first marriage, Charlie from her second, and Polly from her relationship with Skold. Charlie is also the subject of Lackbergs first children's book, Super-Charlie. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 7/15/2020.)
Book Reviews
Smart, unflinching…. [A] novel of female empowerment and triumph over the patriarchy.
Mary Kubica - New York Times Book Review
Läckberg has made a career out of writing ingenious psychological suspense stories about vile people doing vile things…. The Golden Cage tells a nasty tale about entrenched male domination in a supposedly enlightened society; great wealth and the soul rot it can breed; and the payback—oh, the sweet, sick payback of a woman used and spurned, rising up from the discard pile.
Maureen Corrigan - Washington Post
A sexy, deliciously dark journey.
Los Angeles Times
The doyenne of Swedish crime fiction serves up a propulsive tale of a scorned woman who seeks to crush the husband who betrayed her and gets back at him by surreptitiously stealing his multimillion-dollar company out from under him. There’s enough haute couture, Cava, and hot sex to sate a devotee of romance fiction, but the real satisfaction comes in watching our heroine reclaim her fierceness.
Oprah Magazine
One stunningly sexy and over-the-top psychological thriller about the wife of a billionaire entrepreneur whose intelligence and sacrifice is constantly undermined. Faye has some well-hidden secrets too, but she is about to take vengeance of epic proportions on her cheating husband, and, what’s the phrase? Hell Hath No Fury Like a Woman Scorned.
Parade
Sexy, scandalous, and terrifying, this is the kind of suspense story you gobble up in one sitting.
Real Simple
Written by European superstar Lackberg, this is a twisty tale set squarely inside the world of the very rich and very fabulous.
Glamour
Läckberg outdoes herself with this delectable tale of revenge…. The poignant insights into women’s capacity for self-sacrifice, multidimensional characterizations, and celebration of female ingenuity will resonate with many. Lackberg… the thriller queen of Scandinavia.
Publishers Weekly
Comparisons to… Lisbeth Salander will undoubtedly be drawn, and the cunning revenge plot does justify those parallels, but there are satisfying themes of redemption, loyalty, and power here that push the story beyond vengeance. A darkly glamorous and utterly absorbing departure.
Booklist
Faye Adelheim has it all…. She also has rage…. Lackberg deftly teases the reader by dropping clues to Faye’s dark past. We can’t help but wonder if she’s done this before. A deliciously inventive thriller brimming with sex, secrets, and scandal.La
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for THE GOLDEN CAGE … then take off on your own:
1. Describe the "absolutely no expense had been spared" life we find Faye living when the novel opens. Enviable, yes? No?
2. (Follow-up to Question 2) On closer look at Faye's outwardly perfect life, even before she learns of her husband's affair, what can be discerned that all is not quite so perfect?
3. Talk about Faye and Jack when they first met in college. What were Faye and Jack like then? What was Faye'a role in helping Jack become the immense success he has become?
4. How does Jack, "the carefree golden boy," change as the marriage progresses?
5. We learn of Faye's past; as she tells us, "My new identity as Faye gave me strength." How does her former-self affect her present-self, especially when it comes to men?
6. Talk about the role that women friendships play in The Golden Cage. Is this book grounded in a war of the sexes: women pitted against men? Are all men in the novel portrayed as controlling or dishonest?
7. Ultimately, what do you think of Faye's revenge… or Revenge? Do you find her revenge satisfying?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)
The Safe Place
Anna Downes, 2020
St. Martin's Press
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250264800
Summary
Superbly tense and oozing with atmosphere, Anna Downes's debut, The Safe Place, is the perfect summer suspense, with the modern gothic feel of Ruth Ware and the morally complex family dynamics of Lisa Jewell.
Welcome to paradise … will you ever be able to leave?
Emily is a mess.
Emily Proudman just lost her acting agent, her job, and her apartment in one miserable day.
Emily is desperate.
Scott Denny, a successful and charismatic CEO, has a problem that neither his business acumen nor vast wealth can fix. Until he meets Emily.
Emily is perfect.
Scott offers Emily a summer job as a housekeeper on his remote, beautiful French estate. Enchanted by his lovely wife Nina, and his eccentric young daughter, Aurelia, Emily falls headlong into this oasis of wine-soaked days by the pool.
But soon Emily realizes that Scott and Nina are hiding dangerous secrets, and if she doesn't play along, the consequences could be deadly. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Anna Downes was born and raised in Sheffield, UK, but now lives just north of Sydney, Australia with her husband and two children. She worked as an actress before turning her attention to writing.
Downes was shortlisted for the Sydney Writers Room Short Story Prize (2017) and longlisted for the Margaret River Short Story Competition (2018). The Safe Place was inspired by Anna’s experiences working as a live-in housekeeper on a remote French estate in 2009-10. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Downes keeps the sense of foreboding building…. Emily is a compelling character who arrives in France scatterbrained and immature but find the inner strength to save herself.
Washington Post
Gripping, satisfying and also promising first suspense novel. Psychological suspense, really, but in a setting where we expect a "gothic romance'—isolated house, mysterious owner, troubled child needing care.… But a larger cast than that, and characters that, even though we are in close point of view with each in turn, continue to surprise us.
Shawangunk Journal
It all adds up to an intriguing and addictive read. A real page turner; I couldn't put the book down once the secrets began to be unveiled.
AU Review.com (Australia)
[A]tmospheric, fitfully gripping…. Though plenty of surprises await the reader, Aurelia’s palpable suffering casts something of a pall over this mix of romantic escapism and gothic menace. Ruth Ware fans may want to check this one out.
Publishers Weekly
Downes' debut novel is a slow burn of a story with Emily picking up on snippets of conversations as a breadcrumb trail leads her to an astounding conclusion. A great read for those looking for a side of mystery with their women's fiction.
Booklist
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion … then take off on your own:
m. In hindsight, what makes Emily the perfect person for Scott Denny to hire as an au pair for his wife, Nina, and daughter, Aurelia? Consider the state of Emily's life at at the onset of the novel—her lack of money, her family relationships, and her prospects (or lack of) for the future.
m. At first, Querencia is idyllic. When did you you begin, however, to suspect that things were not quite so perfect? What was your first clue?
m. Talk about Scott and what we know about his various machinations.
m. How does Emily's nascent attraction to Scott confuse her growing intuition that things are seriously amiss?
m. The story is told through multiple perspectives—that of Emily, Scott, and Nina. How do the different viewpoints affect what we come to know and when we know it? Did the narrative strategy increase or decrease your surprise at the end? In other words, was the final revelation surprising or predictable?
m. Did your opinion of Emily change by the end of the novel? Does she rise to the level of heroine by meeting the challenges thrown her way?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)
Friends and Strangers
J. Courtney Sullivan, 2020
Knopf Doubleday
416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780525520597
Summary
An insightful, hilarious, and compulsively readable novel about a complicated friendship between two women who are at two very different stages in life, from the best-selling author of Maine and Saints for All Occasions.
Elisabeth, an accomplished journalist and new mother, is struggling to adjust to life in a small town after nearly twenty years in New York City.
Alone in the house with her infant son all day (and awake with him much of the night., she feels uneasy, adrift. She neglects her work, losing untold hours to her Brooklyn moms' Facebook group, her "influencer" sister's Instagram feed, and text messages with the best friend she never sees anymore.
Enter Sam, a senior at the local women's college, whom Elisabeth hires to babysit.
Sam is struggling to decide between the path she's always planned on and a romantic entanglement that threatens her ambition. She's worried about student loan debt and what the future holds. In short order, they grow close.
But when Sam finds an unlikely kindred spirit in Elisabeth's father-in-law, the true differences between the women's lives become starkly revealed and a betrayal has devastating consequences.
A masterful exploration of motherhood, power dynamics, and privilege in its many forms, Friends and Strangers reveals how a single year can shape the course of a life. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1982
• Where—near Boston, Massachusetts, USA
• Education—B.A., Smith College
• Currently—Brooklyn, New York, New York
Julie Courtney Sullivan, better known as J. Courtney Sullivan, is an American novelist and former writer for the New York Times. She comes from an Irish-Catholic family where many of the women go by their middle rather than first names.
Sullivan grew up outside of Boston, Massachusetts. She attended Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she majored in Victorian literature and received the Ellen M. Hatfield Memorial Prize for best short story, the Norma M. Leas prize for excellence in written English, and the Jeanne MacFarland Prize for excellent work in Women's Studies.
She graduated in 2003, then moved to New York and began working at Allure. Sullivan later moved to the New York Times, where she worked for over three years. Her writing has since appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Chicago Tribune, New York magazine, New York Observer, Men's Vogue, Elle, and Glamour.
In 2007, her first book was published, a dating guide titled Dating Up: Dump the Shlump and Find a Quality Man; she has since stated that she wrote the book for money and that "fiction was always [her] passion."
She self-identifies as a feminist, a stance that has been reflected in both her fiction and nonfiction work. In 2006, she wrote a piece for the New York Times "Modern Love" column about her experiences in the dating world, and in 2010 she co-edited a feminist essay collection titled Click: When We Knew We Were Feminists. Her novels often deal prominently with relationships between female characters. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 6/11/2013.)
Book Reviews
J. Courtney Sullivan… begins in the middle of the night… from which promising vantage point we’re given delightful permission to sit back and spy…. Drawn by Sullivan’s deft hand, the relationship feels authentic and richly textured…. Friends and Strangers is a big novel with big ideas…. An honest rendering of what happens behind closed doors.
Clare Lombardo - New York Times Book Review
There’s a rare degree of emotional maturity in Friends and Strangers, a willingness to resist demonizing any of the players, a commitment to exploring the demands of family with the deliberate care such complex relations require. Once again, Sullivan has shown herself to be one of the wisest and least pretentious chroniclers of modern life. Every hard-won insight here is offered up with such casual grace.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
Sullivan’s intimate, incisive latest explores the evolving friendship between a new mother and her babysitter…, showing where the cracks seep into their friendship. Readers will be captivated by Sullivan’s authentic portrait of modern motherhood.
Publishers Weekly
Sullivan humanizes the roadblocks to successful relationships and the modern tools that help or hinder those bonds… in a deceptively quiet tale delivering big truths, complete with an enticing epilog 10 years in the future —Beth Andersen, formerly with Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI
Library Journal
Sullivan… displays her keen observation skills with this insightful examination of two women at very different places in their lives.… [A] deeply personal yet profound exploration of motherhood, friendships, and [how] privilege… shapes our lives.
Booklist
(Starred review. Sullivan… writes with empathy for her characters even as she reveals their flaws… [and] illuminates broader issues about… dueling demands of career and domesticity…. This perceptive novel… resonates as broadly as it does deeply.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Discuss Elisabeth’s fascination with the BK Mamas Facebook group. Why does it have such a strong hold on her? Does she continue to identify as a BK Mama after she moves away, or does she feel different from the women who post in the group?
2. Examine Sam and Elisabeth’s connection. What draws them to each other? How accurate is each woman’s perception of the other? When and why do cracks begin to form in their friendship?
3. Explore Elisabeth and Andrew’s marriage. What challenges does their relationship face over the course of the novel, and how do they confront them? How does parenthood affect their relationship? Do you feel they have a strong foundation as a couple? Why or why not?
4. Consider the role that money plays in the novel. How are the characters’ relationships with each other affected by money? To what extent does money give people power over others? Can money ever strengthen a relationship or is it always a toxic element?
5. Examine Elisabeth’s opinion of the Laurels. In what ways are they different from her friends in Brooklyn? Why does she find them so irksome? What does her judgment of these women suggest about Elisabeth herself? Does her opinion of them ever soften? Consider, as you answer this question, Elisabeth’s struggles with loneliness, her career, and her long-distance friendship with Nomi.
6. Discuss Sam’s feelings for Clive. What initially attracts her to him? What about their relationship gives her pause? How do her friends and family view their relationship? How does she react when she learns of Clive’s deception, and what does his decision to lie about his first marriage suggest about his motivations for wanting to marry Sam?
7. Explore the theme of privilege in the novel. What different kinds of privilege are evident in the lives of the novel’s characters? Are these characters able to recognize their privilege or are they blind to it? Is privilege something to be ashamed of? Why or why not?
8. Examine George’s theory of the Hollow Tree. What are his central beliefs, and why do they resonate so deeply with Sam? Why are Andrew and Elisabeth frustrated with George’s fixation on economic inequality? Why does Elisabeth eventually decide to write a book based on George’s observations?
9. Compare and contrast Sam’s friendship with Isabella and her friendship with Gaby. What common ground does she share with each woman? With which woman does she feel more at ease? Do you believe that both friendships are genuine? Why or why not?
10. Discuss Sam’s decision to write an anonymous letter to President Washington about the working conditions of service employees at the college. What does she hope to accomplish? Why does she decide not to tell her friends in the dining hall about it? What do her friends’ reactions to the letter reveal about their relationship with Sam?
11. Explore the theme of hypocrisy in the novel. Which characters act in a way that contradicts their professed sense of morality? How do these characters reconcile their behavior with their beliefs? How does their hypocrisy affect their friends and family?
12. Examine Elisabeth’s relationships with her mother and father. What are her earliest memories of each of them? How does her relationship with each parent, in addition to her understanding of their marriage, influence her approach to marriage and parenthood?
13. Explore Elisabeth’s decision to lie to Andrew about IVF. What does it reveal about Elisabeth’s character? About her marriage? Why do you think Sullivan chose not to explain how and why Elisabeth and Andrew had a second child?
14. Discuss Sam’s experience of returning to her college town for her ten-year reunion. How has she changed since graduation? In what ways has time altered her perception of her college experience, her friendships with the women in the dining hall, her fallout with Elisabeth, and her relationship with Clive?
(Questions issued by the publishers.)
Sorry for Your Trouble: Stories
Richard Ford, 2020
HarperCollins
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062969804
Summary
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. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—February 16, 1944
• Where—Jackson, Mississippi, USA
• Education—B.A., Michigan State University; M.F.A., University of California, Irvine
• Awards—PEN/Faulkner Award; Pulitzer Prize (more below)
• Currently—lives in Boothbay, Maine
Richard Ford is an American novelist and short story writer. His best-known works are the novels that form the Bascombe quartet: The Sportswriter (1986), Independence Day (1995), The Lay of the Land (2006), and Let Me Be Frank with You (2014). He has also published several short story collections, the stories of which have been widely anthologized.
Early years
Ford was born in Jackson, Mississippi, the only son of Edna and Parker Carrol Ford. Parker was a traveling salesman for Faultless Starch, a Kansas City company. Of his mother, Ford has said, "Her ambition was to be, first, in love with my father and, second, to be a full-time mother." When Ford was eight years old, his father had a major heart attack, and thereafter Ford spent as much time with his grandfather, a former prizefighter and hotel owner in Little Rock, Arkansas, as he did with his parents in Mississippi. Ford's father died of a second heart attack in 1960.
Ford's grandfather had worked for the railroad. At the age of 19, before deciding to attend college, Ford began work on the Missouri Pacific train line as a locomotive engineer's assistant, learning the work on the job.
Ford received a B.A. from Michigan State University. Having enrolled to study hotel management, he switched to English. After graduating he taught junior high school in Flint, Michigan, and enlisted in the US Marines but was discharged after contracting hepatitis. At university he met Kristina Hensley, his future wife; the two married in 1968.
Despite mild dyslexia, Ford developed a serious interest in literature. He has stated in interviews that his dyslexia may, in fact, have helped him as a reader, as it forced him to approach books at a slow and thoughtful pace.
Ford briefly attended law school but dropped out and entered the creative writing program at the University of California, Irvine, to pursue a Master of Fine Arts degree, which he received in 1970. Ford chose this course simply because "they admitted me, he confessed in a profile in Ploughshares (7/8/2010):
They admitted me. I remember getting the application for Iowa, and thinking they'd never have let me in. I'm sure I was right about that, too. But, typical of me, I didn't know who was teaching at Irvine. I didn't know it was important to know such things. I wasn't the most curious of young men, even though I give myself credit for not letting that deter me.
As it turned out, Oakley Hall and E. L. Doctorow were teaching there, and Ford has been explicit about his debt to them. In 1971, he was selected for a three-year appointment in the University of Michigan Society of Fellows.
Early writing
Ford published his first novel, A Piece of My Heart, the story of two unlikely drifters whose paths cross on an island in the Mississippi River, in 1976; he followed it with The Ultimate Good Luck in 1981. In the interim he briefly taught at Williams College and Princeton. Despite good notices the books sold little, and Ford retired from fiction writing to become a writer for the New York magazine Inside Sports. Speaking for same the Ploughshares profile, he said:
I realized there was probably a wide gulf between what I could do and what would succeed with readers. I felt that I'd had a chance to write two novels, and neither of them had really created much stir, so maybe I should find real employment, and earn my keep.
In 1982, the magazine folded, and when Sports Illustrated did not hire Ford, he returned to fiction writing with The Sportswriter, a novel about a failed novelist turned sportswriter who undergoes an emotional crisis following the death of his son. The novel became Ford's "breakout book", named one of Time magazine's five best books of 1986 and a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
Ford followed the success immediately with Rock Springs (1987), a story collection mostly set in Montana that includes some of his most popular stories, adding to his reputation as one of the finest writers of his generation.
Dirty realism
Reviewers and literary critics associated the stories in Rock Springs with the aesthetic movement known as dirty realism. This term referred to a group of writers in the 1970s and 1980s that included Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff—two writers with whom Ford was closely acquainted—along with Ann Beattie, Frederick Barthelme, Larry Brown, and Jayne Anne Phillips, among others.
Those applying this label point to Carver's lower-middle-class subjects or the protagonists Ford portrays in Rock Springs. However, many of the characters in the "Frank Bascombe" books (The Sportswriter, Independence Day, The Lay of the Land, and Let Me Be Frank With You), notably the protagonist himself, enjoy degrees of material affluence and cultural capital not normally associated with the "dirty realist" style.
Mid-career and acclaim
Although his 1990 novel Wildlife, a story of a Montana golf pro turned firefighter, met with mixed reviews and middling sales, by the end of the 1980s Ford's reputation was solid. He was increasingly sought after as an editor and contributor to various projects. Ford edited the 1990 Best American Short Stories, the 1992 Granta Book of the American Short Story, and the 1998 Granta Book of the American Long Story, a designation he claimed in the introduction to prefer to the novella.
In 1995, Ford's career reached a high point with the release of Independence Day, a sequel to The Sportswriter, featuring the continued story of its protagonist, Frank Bascombe. Reviews were positive, and the novel became the first to win both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In the same year, Ford was chosen as winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story, for outstanding achievement in that genre. He ended this prodigiously creative and successful decade of the 1990s with a well-received story collection Women with Men published in 1997.
Later life and writings
Ford lived for many years on lower Bourbon Street in the French Quarter and then in the Garden District of New Orleans, Louisiana, where his wife Kristina was the executive director of the city planning commission. He now lives in East Boothbay, Maine.[12] In between these dwellings, Ford has lived in many other locations, usually in the U.S., though he's pursued an equally peripatetic teaching career.
He took up a teaching appointment at Bowdoin College in 2005, but remained in the post for only one semester. In 2008 Ford served as an Adjunct Professor at the Oscar Wilde Centre with the School of English at Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, teaching on the Masters programme in creative writing. But at the end of 2010, Ford assumed the post of senior fiction professor at the University of Mississippi in the fall of 2011, replacing Barry Hannah, who died in March 2010.
Ford's intense creative pace (writing, teaching, editing, publishing) did not subside, either, as a new decade (and a new century) commenced. He published another story collection A Multitude of Sins (2002), followed by The Lay of the Land (2006), which continues (and, according to Ford's explicit statements made at this time, was to have ended) the Frank Bascombe series.
However, in April 2013, Ford read from a new Frank Bascombe story without revealing to the audience whether or not it was part of a longer work. But by 2014, it was confirmed that the story would indeed appear as part of a longer work to be published in November of that year. Titled Let Me Be Frank With You, it is a work consisting of four interconnected novellas (or "ong stories"), all narrated by Frank Bascombe.
Also, as he did in the preceding decade, Ford continued to assist with various editing projects. In 2007, he edited the New Granta Book of the American Short Story, followed by the Library of America's two-volume edition of the selected works of fellow Mississippi writer Eudora Welty. Ford's latest novel, Canada, was published in 2012. That same year, he became the Emmanuel Roman and Barrie Sardoff Professor of the Humanities and Professor of Writing at the Columbia University School of the Arts.
Critical opinion
Richard Ford's writings demonstrate "a meticulous concern for the nuances of language ... [and] the rhythms of phrases and sentences." Ford has described his sense of language as "a source of pleasure in itself—all of its corporeal qualities, its syncopations, moods, sounds, the way things look on the page."
This "devotion to language" is closely linked to what he calls "the fabric of affection that holds people close enough together to survive." Comparisons have been drawn between Ford's work and the writings of John Updike, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and Walker Percy.
Ford's works of fiction "dramatize the breakdown of such cultural institutions as marriage, family, and community." His...
marginalized protagonists often typify the rootlessness and nameless longing... pervasive in a highly mobile, present-oriented society in which individuals, having lost a sense of the past, relentlessly pursue their own elusive identities in the here and now.*
Ford "looks to art, rather than religion, to provide consolation and redemption in a chaotic time."
Awards and honors
2013 - Prix Femina Etranger for Canada
2013 - Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction for Canada
2001 - PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in short fiction
1995 - PEN/Faulkner Award[9] for Independence Day
1995 - Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Independence Day
1995 - Rea Award for the Short Story for outstanding achievement in that genre. (Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 11/20/2014.)
*Huey Guagliardo, Perspectives on Richard Ford: Redeemed by Affection, University Press of Mississippi, 2000.
Book Reviews
Ford has a gift for nimble interior monologues and a superb ear for the varieties and vagaries of human speech.… Acutely described settings, pitch-perfect dialogue, inner lives vividly evoked, complex protagonists brought toward difficult recognitions.
New York Times Book Review
[B]oth a coherent work of art and a subtle and convincing portrait of contemporary American life among the moneyed middle class.…This is America, and Richard Ford is its chronicler. In these superbly wrought tales he catches, with exquisite precision… the irresistible melancholy that is the mark of American life.
Wall Street Journal
Richard Ford remains an author hostage to the mysterious simplicities of emotional sentiment, commendably so.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Ford’s unrelenting exploration of life’s bleakness and sadness makes these stories enervating, particularly compared to his previous work, though his clear, nuanced prose continues to impress. Ford is a supremely gifted writer, but he’s not at his best here.
Publishers Weekly
A son recalls mourning his father's death in his Mississippi youth. A past-her-prime American woman heads to Canada to say good-bye to an old lover who's dying. And a New Orleans lawyer attempts to get beyond his wife's death. The Pulitzer Prize-winning Ford in short form.
Library Journal
(Starred review) Once again, virtuoso Ford deftly sails the seas and storms of consciousness.
Booklist
[A]bout lives shattered by divorce or death, with protagonists discovering that the pieces they are trying to put together no longer fit, and perhaps never did.… Powerfully unsettling stories in which men nearing the end of their lives wonder, befuddled, if that's all there is.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers Book Club Resources. They can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
(Resources by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)