"First, I''ll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then the murders, which happened later."So begins Canada, the unforgettable story of a boy attempting to find grace, written by the only writer in history to win both the Pulitzer Prize and Pen/Faulkner Award for a single novel. This is the story of Dell Parsons, whose parents rob a bank and fracture his life into a before and an after, crossing the threshold that cannot be uncrossed. After his parents'' arrest and imprisonment, Del and Berner, his twin sister, face a blank future of foster care and social services visits. Berner, willful and burning with anger, runs away - orphaning Del completely. In the midst of his abandonment, a family friend intervenes, spiriting Del across the Montana/Saskatchewan border. There, in a dilapidated town floating in the sea of the Canadian prairie, he''s taken in by Arthur Remlinger - an enigmatic, charismatic man whose own past exists on the other side of a similarly uncrossable border. Undone by the calamity of his parents'' robbery, Del struggles under the vastness of the prairie sky and the stark, unforgiving landscape to realign his sense of self and his perception of the parents he thought he knew, even as he moves on an inexorable collision course with the slow-simmering violence trembling just beneath Arthur Remlinger''s cool reserve.A resonant and luminous masterwork of haunting and spectacular vision, CANADA is an elemental novel of boundaries traversed, innocence lost, and of the mysterious and powerful bonds of family. Told in spare, elegant prose but rich with emotional clarity, lyrical precision, and an acute sense of the grandeur of living, it is a masterpiece from one of the greatest American writers alive. Lire la suite Fermer

Franck Bascombe, le héros d'Un week-end dans le Michigan, est de retour. Ex-écrivain, exjournaliste sportif, ex-mari, Frank s'est reconverti sans conviction dans l'immobilier. Il semble avoir renoncé à toute ambition et observe, désabusé, la banalité et l'insignifiance de la vie de ces concitoyens. Un projet, pourtant, est encore en construction : Franck attend avec impatience le week-end qu'il passera avec son fils, un adolescent perturbé, pour renouer avec lui une relation plus confiante. Bien entendu, rien ne se passe comme prévu...

Franck Bascombe est journaliste sportif.
Divorcé, il vit seul dans une banlieue cossue de la côte Est des Etats-Unis. Pourquoi, après des débuts prometteurs, a-t-il renoncé à l'écriture ? Quel drame a bien pu détruire son mariage ? Les flash-back qui parsèment ce roman dont l'action se déroule sur trois jours apportent des éléments de réponse. Mais aucune explication ne vient à bout du mystère qui enveloppe le narrateur. En écrivant ce livre, Richard Ford renouait avec une veine brillamment illustrée par Saul Bellow et John Updike: une tradition d'analyse caustique et parfois comique de la bourgeoisie aisée, de ses travers, et de ses rites désuets qui comblent avec peine le vide pathétique d'existences vouées à la monotonie.
Un week-end dans le Michigan est le premier tome d'un projet littéraire ambitieux, consacré au personnage de Franck Bascombe, auquel la parution d'indépendance (doublement consacré en 1996 par le prix Pulitzer et le prix Faulkner) donnait toute sa dimension politique.
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Une mine d'or surgie de nulle part, une prison au petit matin, un chalet isolé au milieu de la forêt, un train qui fonce dans la nuit, un vol d'oies blanches au-dessus d'un lac : telles sont les images qui hantent la mémoire du narrateur de ces nouvelles, denses et précises comme des haïkus et toutes situées dans le Montana.
Des histoires de chasse, de meurtre ou d'adultère, racontées par des gens simples qui s'efforcent de survivre, écrasés par les ciels sublimes de l'Ouest américain. Cet admirable recueil de short stories établit Richard Ford dans la proximité de Raymond Carver, dont il fut l'ami. En même temps, il marque le territoire d'un écrivain singulier, explorateur d'espaces intimes (Ma mère, Une saison ardente) et maître du langage (Indépendance).
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''The god of small stories . A set of polished gems from a master craftsman '' Sunday Times ''He writes about human beings and their disappointments with unfailing insight '' Observer ''Finely crafted'' Mail on Sunday ''American master'' Daily Telegraph A woman and man, parted a quarter of a century, reunite in a bar in New Orleans as the St Patrick''s Day parade goes by. A divorced suburban dad helps his daughter pick out a card for her friend who''s moving away. A group of friends in late middle age, all once promising, reunite for dinner when one of their number loses her husband, but the gathering splinters when bitter revelations about their shared past emerge. Two teenage boys sit in a drive-in, the air thick with the scent of gin and popcorn and longing.

A visionary collection of luminous landscapes, of great moments in small lives, of the people we carry with us long after they are gone, Sorry for Your Trouble takes disappointment, ageing, grief, love and marriage and silhouettes them against the heady backdrop of Irish America in the past and present. Earthily humane and profoundly wise, the collection reconfirms its author as the master of contemporary American fiction.>
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Avec «Américaines solitudes», Jean-Luc Bertini traverse les États-Unis et s'interroge sur la place de l'humain pris dans cet immense décor. Il invente ce que Gilles Mora nomme dans sa postface «"une poétique de l'isolement"». Il s'agit-là d'un juste équilibre entre le photographe contemporain face à l'Amérique et cette touche humaniste héritée de la tradition française, qui lui permet de contourner habilement le "tableau photographique américain".

LONGLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE 2017 From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sportswriter comes a deeply personal account of his parents - an intimate portrait of American mid-twentieth century life, and a celebration of family love Edna Akin and Parker Ford married young. For fifteen years they traveled the American south of the 1930s as Parker went about his work as a traveling salesman, selling laundry starch. Life was hotels rooms, roadside bars and always each other. Then a single child was born to them, and a life went a new way.

Blending his parents' lives, drawing on memory, history, anecdote, Richard Ford's Between Them is a stirring contemplation of love's mystery and of loss.
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The Pulitzer-Prize Winning novel for 1996.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.

In this novel of menace and eroticism, 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 form the suavely sadistic drug dealer who suspects Sonny of having cheated him.

"His prose has a taut, cinematic quality that bathes his story with the same hot, mercilessly white light that scorches Mexico."--New York Times Book Review

Welcome to Steelhaven... Under the reign of King Cael the Uniter, this vast cityport on the southern coast has for years been a symbol of strength, maintaining an uneasy peace throughout the Free States. But now a long shadow hangs over the city, in the form of the dread Elharim warlord, Amon Tugha. When his herald infiltrates the city, looking to exploit its dangerous criminal underworld, and a terrible dark magick that has long been buried once again begins to rise, it could be the beginning of the end.

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sportswriter comes a deeply personal account of his parents - an intimate portrait of American mid-twentieth century life, and a celebration of family love

Richard Ford's parents volunteered little about their early lives - and he rarely asked. Later, he pieced their stories together from anecdote, history and the occasional photograph, frozen moments linking him to another time.

''Marvellously subtle, moving and funny'' JOHN BANVILE, OBSERVER
''Wonderfully written in every breath of every sentence'' HERMIONE LEE, GUARDIAN
''Wistful, bittersweet - and often very funny'' DAILY TELEGRAPH

It is approaching Thanksgiving weekend and Frank Bascombe has arrived at a state of optimistic pragmatism that he calls the ''Permanent Period'' of life. Epic mistakes have already been made, dreams downsized, and Frank reflects that now at least there are fewer opportunities left in life. But the tranquility he anticipated is not to be. In fact, as Thanksgiving dinner with his children and first wife nears, the Permanent Period proves as full of possibility as life has ever offered.

Graceful, expansive and filled with pathos, The Lay of the Land is a modern American masterpiece.>

''A work of understated power, intelligence and not a little mischief'' INDEPENDENT
''Funny, touching and profound'' FINANCIAL TIMES
''Another seemingly effortless Ford masterpiece'' DAILY MAIL

Christmas brings Frank Bascombe to the Default Period of his life. Now sixty-eight, Frank resides again in the New Jersey suburb of Haddam, and has thrived - seemingly but not utterly - amid the devastations of Hurricane Sandy, which has left countless lives unmoored, and is remarkably the perfect occasion for Ford and Bascombe to relay four Christmas stories.

With a flawless comedic sensibility and unblinking intelligence, Ford ranges over the full complement of universal subjects: ageing, race, loss, faith, marriage, the real estate debacle - the tumult of the world we live in.>

Quand harry quinn arrive à oaxaca (mexique), il a deux idées entête : faire libérer de prison son copain sonny, arrêté pour trafic de drogue, et reconquérir rae, une fille merveilleuse qui l'a plaqué.
Avec un peu de chance et beaucoup de savoir faire, quinn devrait y parvenir. mais rien ne se passe comme prévu.
Ex-marine, ancien du vietnam, quinn se croyait vacciné contre l'horreur. le cauchemar poisseux et glauque dans lequel il bascule dépasse en violence tout ce qu'il a pu connaître. narcotrafiquants, flics corrompus, avocats marrons, terroristes et soldats des forces spéciales se livrent à une partie de cache-cache mortelle.
Quinn sait qu'il ne peut se fier à personne s'il veut sauver sa peau et celle de rae, qui l'a rejoint dans le motel oú il a trouvé refuge. ils sont bel et bien pris au piège.
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