Wildlife

The New York Times calls best-selling author Prather an 'American Kahlil Gibran.' Here Prather helps us to find our spiritual center with this modern-day book of proverbs.

Annotation

Ford's short, bittersweet fourth novel details how family strife is nature's way and "again proves Ford to be a gifted chronicler." Publishers Weekly

Editorial Reviews

The narrative structure of ''Wildlife'' most closely resembles that of a memoir, yet it lacks a memoir's breadth and scope. Most of the events take place within a three-day period....Although the story is refreshingly direct, Mr. Ford's writing here seems loose, even skimpy, when compared to the densely elegant prose of his earlier works....''Wildlife'' is a thin book rather than a rich one. It is shot through with nuance and minute observation involving four people who have moved from other places to this particular place. Yet these people seem to have no friends; they are present only to one another. Despite the Big Sky setting, this is a decidedly claustrophobic story. Its scenes are rendered almost exclusively inside bedrooms and kitchens and cars, often at night....For all the drama - fires, betrayals, confrontations - the events in ''Wildlife'' are curiously undramatic....The reader is left with the distinct impression - and the hope - that this story has no true end, that it will continue to flow from its author's imagination in infinite variation, its ever-widening circles adding to its dimension with each retelling. In time, it may even assume the weight of myth. -- New York Times

About The Author:

Richard Ford lived with his parents in Jackson, Mississippi, until he was eight years old, at which time his father suffered a near-fatal heart attack. After that, he shuttled back and forth between his parents' home in Jackson and Little Rock, Arkansas, where his maternal grandparents managed a hotel. Ford describes his childhood as happy and contented -- at least until he was 16, when his father died and the young man began to seriously think about his future.

Although he attended Michigan State University with the vague intention of going into hotel management, Ford soon switched over to literature. After graduation, he married his college sweetheart, Kristina Hensley, but was having trouble settling on a career direction. He applied for several jobs (including the police and the CIA!) and even started law school. It was only after none of these panned out that he begin to consider writing for a living. On the advice of a former teacher, he applied to graduate school and was accepted...

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Name:Richard Ford

Date of Birth:February 16, 1944

Place of Birth:Jackson, Mississippi

Education:B.A., Michigan State University, 1966; M.F.A., University of California, Irvine, 1970

Awards:Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner Award for Independence Day, 1996

Biography

Richard Ford lived with his parents in Jackson, Mississippi, until he was eight years old, at which time his father suffered a near-fatal heart attack. After that, he shuttled back and forth between his parents' home in Jackson and Little Rock, Arkansas, where his maternal grandparents managed a hotel. Ford describes his childhood as happy and contented -- at least until he was 16, when his father died and the young man began to seriously think about his future.

Although he attended Michigan State University with the vague intention of going into hotel management, Ford soon switched over to literature. After graduation, he married his college sweetheart, Kristina Hensley, but was having trouble settling on a career direction. He applied for several jobs (including the police and the CIA!) and even started law school. It was only after none of these panned out that he begin to consider writing for a living. On the advice of a former teacher, he applied to graduate school and was accepted into the University of California at Irvine, where he came under the happy, unexpected tutelage of Oakley Hall and E. L. Doctorow.

He began work on his first novel, the story of two drifters whose lives intersect on a desolate island in the Mississippi River. An excerpt appeared in The Paris Review, and the book was accepted for publication. In 1976, A Piece of My Heart was released to good reviews, but Ford bristled at being pigeonholed by critics as a regional writer. "I'm a Southerner, God knows," Ford said in an interview with the literary journal Ploughshares, "but I always wanted my books to exist outside the limits of so-called Southern writing."

In the early '80s, Ford's wife (who holds a Ph.D. in urban planning) was teaching at NYU, and the couple was living in Princeton, New Jersey. Disillusioned with novel writing, Ford took a job with the glossy New York magazine Inside Sports, but in 1982 the magazine folded, leaving him unemployed again. Tentatively he returned to fiction with the glimmer of a story idea based loosely on his most recent experiences. Several years in the making, The Sportswriter introduced Frank Bascombe, a middle-aged writer from suburban New Jersey who forsakes his promising literary career to pen articles for a glossy New York magazine. Published in 1986, the novel was named one of Time magazine's five best books of the year and was nominated for a PEN/Faulkner Award.

Ford claims that he never intended to write a trilogy around Frank Bascombe. But, in between other literary projects (including an acclaimed 1987 short story collection, Rock Springs), he found himself inexorably drawn back into the life of his melancholic protagonist. In 1995, the superb sequel, Independence Day, won both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Then, in 2006, Ford concluded the saga with The Lay of the Land, a bittersweet set piece nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award.

Although Ford modestly maintained that the only reason he won the Pulitzer Prize was that Philip Roth had not written a novel that year, in fact his angst-ridden suburban Everyman Frank Bascombe ranks alongside Roth's Nathan Zuckerman (or, for that matter, John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom) as one of American literature's most unforgettable, richly drawn characters. For a man who stumbled into writing with very little forethought or design, Richard Ford has indeed come far.