Rock Springs — Richard Ford

Ten “beautifully imagined and crafted stories” of the American West by the Pulitzer Prize�"winning author of Independence Day (Joyce Carol Oates).
 
In these ten exquisite stories, Richard Ford explores the wind-scrubbed landscape of the American West and the guarded hopes and gnawing loneliness of the people who live there: a refugee from justice driving across Wyoming with his daughter and girlfriend in a stolen Mercedes; a boy watching his family dissolve in a night of tragicomic violence; and two men and a woman swapping hard-luck stories in a frontier bar as they try to sweeten their luck.
 
In the tradition of Raymond Carver, Rock Springs is a masterpiece of taut narration, cleanly chiseled prose, and empathy so generous that it feels like a kind of grace. “The finest of these stories achieve luminous moments, moments with potential to change how the reader sees and thinks” (The New York Times Book Review).