Sorry for Your Trouble
Stories
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3.9 • 23 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
A landmark new collection of stories from Richard Ford that showcases his brilliance, sensitivity, and trademark wit and candor
In Sorry for Your Trouble, Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times-bestselling author 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 twenty years, and their discovery of what’s left of love for them.
Typically rich with Ford’s emotional lucidity and lyrical precision, Sorry for Your Trouble is a memorable collection from one of our greatest writers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pulitzer-winner Ford's middling collection (after Let Me Be Frank with You) showcases men experiencing glimmers of epiphanies amid the process of mourning. In "The Run of Yourself," a lawyer from New Orleans lives a quiet existence in Maine after his wife's untimely death, and a chance meeting in a bar with a younger woman leads to a platonic sleepover and an eye-opening morning walk on the beach. In "Second Language," Jonathan, a widower who made his millions in Texas oil, begins a new life in New York City with a shaky marriage. After his new wife's mother dies, Jonathan comforts her while realizing they will never really understand each other. In the standout story, "Displaced," 16-year-old Henry reels from his father's death and lives in a rooming house with his mother in Jackson, Miss. Henry befriends Niall, an Irish-American teenager; after they get drunk, Henry lets Niall kiss him, and though he's open to being comforted, he's unwilling to explore a sexual relationship. Ford's unrelenting exploration of life's bleakness and sadness makes these stories enervating, particularly compared to his previous work, though his clear, nuanced prose continues to impress. Ford is a supremely gifted writer, but he's not at his best here.
