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Rock Springs (short story collection)

short story collection by Richard Ford

Rock Springs is the first collection of short stories by author Richard Ford, published in

As with his earlier novels A Piece of My Heart () and The Ultimate Good Luck (), the stories from Ford's debut collection are notable for both their lack of sentimentality and undercurrent of menace.^[a]Raymond Carver selected Ford's short story "Communist" for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories .^[1]

In retrospect, Rock Springs has become known as one of Ford's “Montana books,” along with Wildlife (), and Canada (), since the setting for most of the stories occurs in that state.^[2]

The ten stories of Rock Springs appear in this sequence:^[3]

"Rock Springs"
"Great Falls"
"Sweet Hearts"
"Children"
"Going to the Dogs"
"Empire"
"Winterkill"
"Optimists"
"Fireworks"
"Communist"

All ten of the stories were first published in magazines:

On the “Acnowledgements” page Ford expresses gratitude to Gary L.

Fisketjon and to L. Rust Hills for their editorial help and encouragement.

Reception

Upon the publication of Rock Springs in , reviews were enthusiastic and this collection was well received.

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Rock Springs is the first collection of short stories by author Richard Ford , published in As with his earlier novels A Piece of My Heart and The Ultimate Good Luck , the stories from Ford's debut collection are notable for both their lack of sentimentality and undercurrent of menace. The ten stories of Rock Springs appear in this sequence: [ 3 ]. Fisketjon and to L. Rust Hills for their editorial help and encouragement.

In September of that year, George Johnson in The New York Times wrote:

”the finest of them achieve luminous moments, moments with potential to change how the reader sees and thinks. The stories of Rock Springs are extremely concentrated, so a reader who pays attention not only wants to turn pages but to prolong them, experience the supple, ironic, expanding and contracting medium Mr.

Ford compounds from everyday speech. What distinguishes his stories from those of many contemporaries who share conventions of style and subject matter is just this personal, vital, idiomatic presence that both mirrors and critiques our habits of language.”^[4]

A decade later, The Paris Review —profiling Ford for its iconic interview series— acknowledged that: “His single volume of stories has established him as a master of the genre.”^[5]

In her New Yorker piece profiling Ford and his recently published novel Canada, Lorrie Moore recognized the continued influence of Ford's first story collection some 25 years after it was published:

”Ford has long made dissection of a certain unsavoriness part of his skill as a writer—he can parse spoiled masculinity like the finest of feminists—most famously in the widely anthologized short stories “Rock Springs” and “Communist.” A boy’s experience of adult carelessness has often been his subject.”^[6]

In an interview from , Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro was asked “What books do you find yourself returning to again and again?” To which Ishiguro responded: “I tend not to reread whole books over and over, even my big favorites.

But I do keep returning to certain short stories, the way I might to favorite pieces of music.” Ishiguro mentioned “Rock Springs” (the actual story) as one of his favorite stories.^[b]^[7]

Notes

^These early Ford stories led Granta editor Bill Buford to include Ford in his 'Dirty realism' categorization alongside fellow short-story writer Raymond Carver.
^The full quote: ”I tend not to reread whole books over and over, even my big favorites.
Richard ford facebook These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own. Written by Ekaterina Neprokina and other people who wish to remain anonymous. Instead of using the traditional buildup of a story, with villains and heroes, Ford manages to make the characters plain people with stories to tell. Bad fortune and luck plague them, more than any other human source in the book, which makes the reader sympathize with the characters, instead of anger or agitation towards an antihero.
But I do keep returning to certain short stories, the way I might to favorite pieces of music. Richard Ford’s “Rock Springs” (the actual story); Chekhov’s “Ionych”; V. S. Naipaul’s “Tell Me Who to Kill”; Raymond Carver’s collection “Fires”; P. G. Wodehouse’s “The Clicking of Cuthbert”; Conan Doyle’s “Silver Blaze.” And John Millington Synge’s play “In the Shadow of the Glen.”

References