A Multitude of Sins
By Richard Ford
Knopf, 2002

(From the publisher) One of the most celebrated—and unflinching—chroniclers of modern life now explores, in this masterful collection of short stories, the grand theme of intimacy, love, and their failures. With remarkable agility, insight, and candor, Ford envisions our most fallible human efforts to achieve what we consider most important with one another: to be faithful and sincere, empathetic and patient, to be honest and passionate and finally loving toward those we care for or merely, if desperately, desire.

As in all of Ford’s work, the settings are as distinct as the Connecticut countryside is from New Orleans, or a Michigan ski resort from Grand Central Station. Yet in each he is drawn to liaisons in and out and to the sides of marriage. An illicit visit to the Grand Canyon reveals a vastness even more profound. An exacting career woman celebrates Christmas with her adamantly post-nuclear family. A couple weekending in Maine try to recapture the ardor that has disappeared, both gradually and suddenly, from their life together. A boy confronts his estranged father on a hunting trip and finds a disappointment that will change him forever. As they drive through a spring evening, a young wife confesses to her husband the affair she had with the host of the dinner party they’re about to join.

It is within such relations, these extraordinary stories suggest, that our entire sense of right and wrong is enacted, and the rigorous intensity Richard Ford brings to these vivid, unforgettable dramas marks this as his most powerfully arresting book to date.

About the Author

	© Alain Mercier

(From Random House Reading Group Guides) Richard Ford was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1944, the only child of a traveling salesman for a starch company, and was raised in Mississippi and in Arkansas. He went to college at Michigan State University, where he met Kristina Hensley, to whom he has been married since 1968. Ford attended law school very briefly before entering the University of California at Irvine, where he received his M.F.A. in writing in 1970.

After publishing two novels, A Piece of My Heart (1976) and The Ultimate Good Luck (1981), Ford took a job writing for Inside Sports magazine. When the magazine was sold, he decided to write a book about a sportswriter; the resulting novel, published in 1986, received widespread acclaim: It was named one of five best books of 1986 by Time magazine. The Sportswriter was followed by Rock Springs (1987), a highly praised book of short stories, and in 1990 by a novel set in Great Falls, Montana, called Wildlife. His novel Independence Day won the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction, the first novel ever to win both awards, in 1996.

In addition to his steady production of fiction, Ford has also taught writing and literature at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, at Princeton University, and at Williams College.

Ford lives in New Orleans, Louisiana, where his wife, Kristina, is the head of the city planning commission. He travels frequently and also spends time on a plantation in the Mississippi Delta and at his cabin in Chinook, Montana.