The Lay of the Land

Fülszöveg

ROBERT 1
In addition to the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award, Richard Ford has received the PEN/Malamud Award for short fiction, and his work has been translated into sixteen languages. He lives in Maine and New Orleans.
Richard Ford's A Piece of My Heart, The Ultimate Good Luck, The Sportswriter, Rock Springs, Wildlife, Independence Day, Women with Men, and A Multitude of Sins are available in Vintage paperback.
"With a mastery second to none, Richard Ford has created a character we know as well as our next-door neighbors. Frank Bascombe has earned himself a place beside Willy Loman and Harry Angstrom in our literary landscape, but he has done so with a wry wit and a fin de siecle wisdom that is very much his own."
—Charles Johnson, front cover. The New York Times Book Review
T/T/^ith The Spojtswriter, in 1986, Richard Ford r r commenced a cycle of novels that ten years later—after Independence Day won both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award—was hailed by... Tovább

Fülszöveg

ROBERT 1
In addition to the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award, Richard Ford has received the PEN/Malamud Award for short fiction, and his work has been translated into sixteen languages. He lives in Maine and New Orleans.
Richard Ford's A Piece of My Heart, The Ultimate Good Luck, The Sportswriter, Rock Springs, Wildlife, Independence Day, Women with Men, and A Multitude of Sins are available in Vintage paperback.
"With a mastery second to none, Richard Ford has created a character we know as well as our next-door neighbors. Frank Bascombe has earned himself a place beside Willy Loman and Harry Angstrom in our literary landscape, but he has done so with a wry wit and a fin de siecle wisdom that is very much his own."
—Charles Johnson, front cover. The New York Times Book Review
T/T/^ith The Spojtswriter, in 1986, Richard Ford r r commenced a cycle of novels that ten years later—after Independence Day won both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award—was hailed by The Times of London as "an extraordinary epic [that] is nothing less than the story of the twentieth century itself." Now, a decade later, Frank Bascombe returns, with a new lease on life (and real estate), more acutely in thrall to life's endless complexities than ever before.
His story resumes in the autumn of 2000, when his trade as a realtor on the Jersey Shore is thriving, permitting him to revel in the acceptance of "that long, stretching-out time when my dreams would have mystery like any ordinary person's; when whatever I do or say, who I marry, how my kids turn out, becomes what the world—if it makes note at all— knows of me, how I'm seen, understood, even how I think of myself before whatever there is that's wild and unassuagable rises and cheerlessly hauls me off to oblivion." But as a Presidential election hangs in the balance, and a postouclear-family Thanksgiving looms before him along with crises both marital and medical, Frank discovers that what he terms the Permanent Period is fraught with unforeseen perils: "All the ways that life feels like life at age fifty-five were strewn around me like poppies."
A holiday, and a novel, no one will ever forget— at once hilarious, harrowing, surprising, and profound. The Lay of the Land is astonishing in its own right and a magnificent expansion of one of the most celebrated chronicles of our time.
The Sportswriter (1986)
"Nothing if not transcendent. . . Frank Bascombe [is] a man who has seen the fault line of the world and kept on going, and that is part of the power of this large-spirited novel." —Gail Caldwell, The Boston Globe
"A compelling novel, The Spoitswriter has as much, or as little, to do with sportswriting as Moby-Dick had to do with whaling. Ford is writing about modern uncommitted man, lashing himself to the railing of mundane daily life, trying to get through the storm."
—George Vecsey, The New York Times
"With its small gallery of sharply drawn characters, its deep wisdom of the way we live, its forceful and often soaring, sometimes downright moving way of speech, and its reverberating, redemptive plot, Ford's novel overcomes an excess of virtues. It transcends them [with] a deftness and intensity that we find in few books by writers of our generation."
—Alan Cheuse, Los Angeles Herald-Examiner
Independence Day (1995)
"A Babe Ruth of novelists, excelling at every part of the game: one-on-one dialogue, panoramic vistas, funny one-sentence character sketches, deeply earnest expeditions into individual souls . . . He is one of the finest curators of the great American living museum."
—Donna Rifkind, The Washington Post
"Stunning An astonishing achievement [by] an enviably gifted writer."
—David Wiegand, San Francisco Chronicle
"Each flash of magical dialogue, every rumination [is] a wild surprise tossed off as if it were just a bit of cigarette ash by Richard Ford's profligate imagination. Independence Day is a confirmation of a talent as strong and varied as American fiction has to offer."
—Elizabeth Hardwick, The New York Review of Books
Also available írom Random House Audio
Jacket photograph by Chris Jones Jacket design by Carol Devine Carson

Alfi-ed A. Knopf, Publisher, New York
www.aaknopf.com 11/2006 Vissza