In each of these tales master storyteller Richard Ford is drawn to the themes of intimacy, love, and their failures. An illicit visit to the Grand Canyon reveals a vastness even more profound; an exacting career woman celebrates Christmas with her adamantly post-nuclear family; a couple weekending in Maine try to recapture the ardour that has disappeared, both gradually and suddenly, from their lives; on a spring evening's drive, a young wife confesses to her husband the affair she had with the host of the dinner party they're about to join.

Two men, one in search of a woman, the other in search of his true self, meet in a bizarre household on an uncharted island hideaway in the Mississippi. Richard Ford's first novel is brutal, yet often moving and funny.

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. This is a story collection about ordinary women, men and children.

In this novel of menace and eroticism, Richard Ford updates the tradition of Conrad for the age of cocaine smuggling. The setting is Oaxaca, Mexico, where 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."His prose has a taut, cinematic quality that bathes his story with the same hot, mercilessly white light that scorches Mexico."-New York Times Book Review

In the autumn of 1960, Joe Brinson and his parents move to the edge of the Rocky Mountains to cash in on the promise of the American frontier. But when Joe's father leaves home to fight the forest fires and his mother meets an older man, Joe finds his life suddenly changing beyond recognition.

As Ford's women and men each experience the consolations and complications of relationships with the opposite sex, they must confront the difference between privacy and intimacy and the distinction between pleasing another and pleasing oneself.