In 1956, Dell Parsons' family came to a stop in Great Falls, Montana, the way many military families did after the war. His father, Bev, was a talkative airman from Alabama with an optimistic and easy-scheming nature. Their mother Neeva - shy, artistic - was alienated from their father's small-town world. It was more bad instincts and bad luck that Dell's parents decided to rob the bank. They weren't reckless people. In the days following the arrest,...

Like most people Frank Bascombe of New Jersey, a divorced realtor, has plans for the Fourth of July weekend: find a new home for a client, see his semi-girlfriend and take his son to a sports hall of fame. Instead, one disappointment follows another, but he takes them in his stride--philosophically. By the author of The Sportswriter.

From American master Richard Ford, a memoir: his first work of nonfiction, a stirring narrative of memory and parental love. How is it that we come to consider our parents as people with rich and intense lives that include but also exclude us? Richard Ford's parents-Edna, a feisty, pretty Catholic-school girl with a difficult past; and Parker, a sweet-natured, soft-spoken traveling salesman-were rural Arkansans born at the turn of the twentieth century....

In these ten exquisite stories, first published by Atlantic Monthly Press in 1987 and reissued as a Grove Press paperback, Richard Ford mines literary gold from the wind-scrubbed landscape of the American West-and from the guarded hopes and gnawing loneliness of the people who live there: a refugee from justice driving across Wyoming with his daughter and an unhappy girlfriend in a stolen, cranberry-colored Mercedes; a boy watching his family dissolve...

A law professor and cultural critic offers an eye-opening exploration of the laws of fashion throughout history, from the middle ages to the present day, examining the canons, mores and customs of clothing rules that we often take for granted.