Independence Day (75 page)

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-76210-2

INDEPENDENCE DAY

In this visionary sequel to
The Sportswriter
, Richard Ford deepens his portrait of one of the most unforgettable characters in American fiction, and in so doing gives us an indelible portrait of America. Frank Bascombe, in the aftermath of his divorce and the ruin of his career, has entered an “Existence Period,” selling real estate in Haddam, New Jersey, and mastering the high-wire act of normalcy. But over one Fourth of July weekend, Frank is called into sudden, bewildering engagement with life.
Independence Day
is a moving, peerlessly funny odyssey through America and through the layered consciousness of one of its most compelling literary incarnations, conducted by a novelist of astonishing empathy and perception.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-73518-2

THE LAY OF THE LAND

A sportswriter and a real estate agent, husband and father— Frank Bascombe has been many things to many people. His uncertain youth behind him, we follow him through three days during the autumn of 2000, when his trade as a Realtor on the Jersey Shore is thriving. But as a presidential election hangs in the balance, and a postnuclear-family Thanksgiving looms before him, Frank discovers that what he terms the “Permanent Period” is fraught with unforeseen perils. An astonishing meditation on America today and filled with brilliant insights,
The Lay of the Land
is a magnificent achievement from one of the most celebrated chroniclers of our time.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-77667-3

A PIECE OF MY HEART

Richard Ford’s mesmerizing first novel is the story of two godless pilgrims. Robert Hewes has driven across the country in the service of a destructive passion. Sam Newel is seeking the missing piece of himself. When these men converge, on an uncharted island in the Mississippi, each discovers the thing he’s looking for—amid a conflagration of violence that’s as shocking as it is inevitable.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-394-72914-5

THE ULTIMATE GOOD LUCK

In this masterful novel of menace and eroticism, psychological revelation and shimmering atmosphere, 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 from the suavely sadistic drug dealer who suspects Sonny of having cheated him. What ensues is an exquisitely choreographed dance in which everyone—from expatriate whores to silent Zapotec Indians—is waiting for a chance at the ultimate good luck.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-394-75089-7

WOMEN WITH MEN

These three stories take us from the plains of Montana to the streets of Paris to the suburbs of Chicago. In these locales, Ford’s characters experience the consolations and complications that prevail in matters of passion, romance, and love. A seventeen-year-old boy starting adulthood in the shadow of his parents’ estrangement, a survivor of three marriages now struggling with cancer, an ostensibly devoted husband entering middle age, a woman scandalously betrayed by her husband—each contends with the vast distances that exist between those who are closest together. With peerless emotional nuance and authority, Richard Ford has once again demonstrated his mastery of short fiction.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-77668-0

A MULTITUDE OF SINS

With remarkable insight and candor, Richard Ford examines liaisons in and out and to the sides of marriage. An illicit visit to the Grand Canyon reveals a vastness even more profound. A couple weekending in Maine try to recapture the ardor that has disappeared from their life together. And on a spring evening, a young wife tells her husband of her affair with the host of the dinner party they’re about to join. The rigorous intensity Ford brings to these vivid, unforgettable dramas marks this as his most powerfully arresting book to date— confirming the judgment of
The New York Times Book Review
that “nobody now writing looks more like an American classic.”

Fiction/Short Stories/978-0-375-72656-9

VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES
Available at your local bookstore, or visit
www.randomhouse.com

FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, JULY 1996

Copyright © 1995 by Richard Ford

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1995.

Portions of this work were originally published in
Antaeus, Esquire
, and
The New Yorker
.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Famous Music Corporation for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Isn’t It Romantic?” by Lorenz Hart and Richard Rodgers, copyright © 1932 by Famous Music Corporation, copyright renewed 1959 by Famous Music Corporation.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Ford, Richard, [
date
]
Independence day/by Richard Ford.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-76380-8
1. Real estate agents—New Jersey—Fiction.
2. Fathers and sons—New Jersey—Fiction.
3. Divorced men—New Jersey—Fiction.
I. Title.
PS 3556.0713153 1995
813′.54— DC 20 95-3126

Random House Web address:
http://www.randomhouse.com/

v3.0