Richard Ford

As a sportswriter, Frank Bascombe makes his living studying people—men, mostly—who live entirely within themselves. This is a condition that Frank himself aspires to. But at thirty-eight, he suffers from incurable dreaminess, occasional pounding of the heart, and the not-too-distant losses of a career, a son, and a marriage. In the course of the Easter week in which Ford's moving novel transpires, Bascombe will end up losing the remnants...

A sixteen-year-old boy faces adulthood in a small Montana town, observing love, marriage, adultery, the working life, and unemployment.

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...

As the label of "prejudice" is applied to more and more situations, it loses a clear and agreed-upon meaning. This makes it easy for self-serving individuals and political hacks to use accusations of racism, sexism, homophobia, and other types of "bias" to advance their own ends. Law professor Ford brings sophisticated legal analysis, lively anecdotes, and plain old common sense to this heated topic, offering ways to separate valid claims from bellyaching....