- Paperback: 256 pages
- Publisher: Flamingo; New Ed edition (29 Jun 1989)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0006543529
- ISBN-13: 978-0006543527
- Product Dimensions: 20.4 x 12.8 x 1.4 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 2,120,245 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Rock Springs
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More About the Author
Product Description
Joyce Carol Oates
‘Richard Ford is a born storyteller with and inimitable lyric voice – and Rock Springs is the very poetry of realism’
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Jeremy Brooks, Independent
'Richard Ford writes intense and immediate prose that glows with a mysterious light, like a candle shining through the walls of a hollow pumpkin’
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I can't believe there isn't a review for this collection of short stories already on this site. This is a fantastic collection from a writer more renowned for his novels.
The stories here pack a shorter more powerful punch and are just as enjoyable as Sportswriter and Independence Day.
In style they may be compared to Carver and Woolfe dealing in family dysfunction, addiction and crushed dreams. "Optimists" for example is a particularly shocking tale of accidental and not so accidental death.
Most of the sories are set in small town Montana or in one excellent story on a train heading there and beautifully evoke a small town feel.
I cannot recommend this book highly enough and certainly ranks up there with "Hunters in the snow" by Tobias Woolfe.
The stories here pack a shorter more powerful punch and are just as enjoyable as Sportswriter and Independence Day.
In style they may be compared to Carver and Woolfe dealing in family dysfunction, addiction and crushed dreams. "Optimists" for example is a particularly shocking tale of accidental and not so accidental death.
Most of the sories are set in small town Montana or in one excellent story on a train heading there and beautifully evoke a small town feel.
I cannot recommend this book highly enough and certainly ranks up there with "Hunters in the snow" by Tobias Woolfe.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Having just finished a standard tourist guide to Wyoming that rightly sings the praises of the uplifting value of the Grand Tetons, Yellowstone, et al., I thought it would be useful to read another, entirely different "guide book." I have read most of Richard Ford, including "Rock Springs", which I first read about 10 years ago, and found the re-read just as rewarding as the first time.
Ford simply SEES deeper into the anguish, and poverty of human existence than most of us, and then he has a magic ability to deftly capture his vision onto paper, carefully using a few phrases that capture the essence of the scene. In about half of these 10 short stories, one of the characters is going to, or returning from Deer Lodge Prison. In all, they are bitten by economic insecurity. The male-female interactions are almost always "heartless." It is virtually impossible to read these sad stories without thinking of the cliché, "lives of quiet desperation."
In some of his other books he does describe equally well other social strata, but in this one he manages to depict those living a very hard-scrabble existence. You have to wonder how he actually does it. None of his characters find their surroundings inspiring, or receive any solace from them. These are bare, bleak lives, so if you are on your way to the Grand Tetons, perhaps stopping in a shabby bar in Rock Springs, and looking around carefully, might provide an essential balance to the experience.
(Note: Review first published at Amazon, USA, on April 04, 2008)
Ford simply SEES deeper into the anguish, and poverty of human existence than most of us, and then he has a magic ability to deftly capture his vision onto paper, carefully using a few phrases that capture the essence of the scene. In about half of these 10 short stories, one of the characters is going to, or returning from Deer Lodge Prison. In all, they are bitten by economic insecurity. The male-female interactions are almost always "heartless." It is virtually impossible to read these sad stories without thinking of the cliché, "lives of quiet desperation."
In some of his other books he does describe equally well other social strata, but in this one he manages to depict those living a very hard-scrabble existence. You have to wonder how he actually does it. None of his characters find their surroundings inspiring, or receive any solace from them. These are bare, bleak lives, so if you are on your way to the Grand Tetons, perhaps stopping in a shabby bar in Rock Springs, and looking around carefully, might provide an essential balance to the experience.
(Note: Review first published at Amazon, USA, on April 04, 2008)
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Richard Ford sets this beautiful collection of stories about people on the margins in a lonely landscape of motels, hunting lodges and stolen cars. The people in the stories grow out of the landscape of Montana, Wyoming and inland Washington state. It appears as marginal as the people in the stories, an enormous cold and escapeless place, especially reading it in the compactness of England. Some of the characters dream of escaping to Florida, or Hawaii. Some know people who have escaped there. Even physically having a ticket to this America does not allow them to move to its warm embrace. Although they lie in the same country, the endlessness and continuity of the stories in the landscape of train yards, cornfields, mines, one-street towns and trailer parks makes any links appear only as fantasies.
The people come from broken relationships, absent parents, parents who fight and drink and go to prison. People are often on the run, or in transit and, dreaming of being somewhere else. So much of their lives have been about exclusion. The stories linger in the mind and are a pleasure to read and think about afterwards, however. A glimpse of optimism regularly glints through. This may be fantasy and a dream, but it is not so completely. A stolen car is always remembered as stolen, but there are times when the character just lets himself forget that, and enjoy what he has; the thoughts of the possibilities that, if the car really were his, what life and identity could be had. Whilst the characters do not live through history in the stories - they are short, and last only a few days or hours - their histories are explicated during that time, and so much effort is made to move beyond that in both their physical surroundings and in their relationships. Deep respect, and hope is placed in, deeply flawed companions
Children in the stories are a great source of optimism, and seem resistant to their parents troubles. They continue to have a chance to recreate their world in a full way, at some time in the future. Rock Springs was to me memorable because of this. The dreamlike realism of the writing lends the stories gravitas, and the inner lives of people in a world not often thought about are minutely and thoughtfully explicated.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
A Masterpiece........
Simply unbelievable . This is easily one of the best collection of short stories i've ever read , in fact i'll say it IS the best . It's certainly the one i return to most often . Read more
Published 11 months ago by William Stephen Dalrymple
The Unvarnished Truth
Ford's short stories here are set in the West- far from the urban East of Frank Bascombe, his best-known character. Read more
Published on 22 May 2002
Sweet, wise, honest
There is something sweet and wise and honest in these stories, in even in their apparent lack of sentimentality. Read more
Published on 22 May 2002 by T. BRANNEY
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