Over the course of four celebrated works of fiction and almost 40 years, Richard Ford has crafted an ambitious, incisive and singular view of American life as lived. Unconstrained, astute, provocative and often laugh-out-loud funny, Frank Bascombe is once more our guide to the great American midway. Now in the twilight of life, a man who has occupied many colorful lives --- sportswriter, father, husband, ex-husband, friend, real estate agent --- Bascombe finds himself in the most sorrowing role of all: caregiver to his son, Paul, diagnosed with ALS. On a shared winter odyssey to Mount Rushmore, Frank, in typical Bascombe fashion, faces down the mortality that is assured each of us. In doing so, he confronts what happiness might signify at the end of days.

In SORRY FOR YOUR TROUBLE, Pulitzer Prize winner 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 20 years, and their discovery of what’s left of love for them.

Richard Ford’s parents --- Edna, a feisty, pretty Catholic-school girl with a difficult past; and Parker, a sweet-natured, soft-spoken traveling salesman --- were rural Arkansans born at the turn of the 20th century. Married in 1928, they lived “alone together” on the road, traveling throughout the South. Eventually they had one child, born late, in 1944. For Ford, the questions of what his parents dreamed of, how they loved each other and loved him become a striking portrait of American life in the mid-century. BETWEEN THEM is Ford’s vivid image of where his life began and where his parents’ lives found their greatest satisfaction.

Through Frank Bascombe, we’ve witnessed the aspirations, sorrows, longings, achievements and failings of an American life in the twilight of the 20th century. Now, in LET ME BE FRANK WITH YOU, author Richard Ford reinvents Bascombe in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. In four narratives, Bascombe (and Ford) attempts to reconcile, interpret and console a world undone by calamity.

When 15-year-old Dell Parsons' mother and father rob a bank, his sense of a happy, knowable life is forever shattered. Undone by the calamity of his parents' criminal actions and arrest, Dell struggles under the vast prairie sky to remake himself and define the adults he thought he knew.