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Rock Springs
 
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Rock Springs (Paperback)

by Richard Ford (Author)
5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)

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Product details

  • Paperback: 256 pages
  • Publisher: Vintage; New edition edition (24 Jun 2003)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0099448971
  • ISBN-13: 978-0099448976
  • Product Dimensions: 19.2 x 13 x 1.8 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 1,324,168 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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    #57 in  Books > Fiction > Authors, A-Z > F > Ford, Richard

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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’


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’
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Rock Springs
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Customer Reviews

4 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
5.0 out of 5 stars (4 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A short story masterpiece, 14 Dec 2005
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.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A strong and gentle picture of peoples lives in the margins., 31 May 2002
By A Customer
This review is from: Rock Springs (Harvill Panther) (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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5.0 out of 5 stars The Unvarnished Truth, 22 May 2002
By A Customer
This review is from: Rock Springs (Harvill Panther) (Paperback)
Ford's short stories here are set in the West- far from the urban East of Frank Bascombe, his best-known character. But these ten stories are each peopled by indelible people who Ford seems less to have created than to have stumbled over. He follows them for a while, then lets them go. His realism brings with it an aching sadness along with the empathy it provokes. From heartbreak to humor, Ford's short srories are as powerful as his novels.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars 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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