The American Wife

by Ford, Elaine

• ISBN13: 9780472116201
• ISBN10: 0472116207
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-10-15
• Publisher: Univ of Michigan Pr

Summary

"Elaine Ford's collection roams the territory between the intellect and the heart. She writes of the human condition with precision, in language that is both grave and conversational. Her characters step out of the real world onto the page, where she develops them quietly, but with compassionate fullness. This writer grips the reader with her keen knowledge of the psyche of individuals-their motives and secretsand also with the surprising things that happen to them." Laura Kasischke, judge, Michigan Literary Fiction Awards Of Elaine Ford's novel,Missed Connections, theWashington Postwrote that it is a work "of small episodes, of precise sentences, of unusual clarity." That same clarity proves an unsettling force in Ford's stories, where precision of prose often belies uncertainties hidden beneath. In the title piece, an American woman in England, embroiled in a relationship doomed to fail, discovers how little she understands about her own desires and impulses. In another story, another American wife, abandoned in Greece by her archaeologist husband, struggles to solve a crime no one else believes to have been committed. Throughout her stories Ford touches on the mysteries that make up our lives. Each story in itself is a masterpiece of such detail and power as to transform the way we see the world.

Author Biography

Elaine Ford is Professor Emerita at the University of Maine, where she taught creative writing and literature.

Table of Contents

The Garage Artist	p. 1
Changeling	p. 8
Dyslexia	p. 24
The Cocoanut Grove	p. 34
Levitation	p. 40
Rita Lafferty's Lucky Summer	p. 45
Cousins	p. 50
The Scow	p. 73
The American Wife	p. 87
A Sense of Morality	p. 99
Red Woman, Black Woman	p. 102
Hide and Seek	p. 112
Reaping Tares	p. 129
The Life of the Mind	p. 144
Nerve- Wrackin' Christmas	p. 163
Since You've Been Gone	p. 171
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