''Rock Springs'' is a collection of short stories by author
Richard Ford, published in 1987 and largely dealing with dysfunctional mothers and fathers and their effects on young male narrators.
As with his earlier novels ''A Piece of My Heart'' (1976) and ''The Ultimate Good Luck'' (1981), Ford's stories are notable for their lack of sentimentality and undercurrent of menace, characteristics that led ''Granta'' editor
Bill Buford
Bill Buford (born 1954) is an American author and journalist. Buford is the author of the books ''Among the Thugs'' and ''Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscan ...
to include Ford in his '
Dirty realism' categorization alongside fellow short-story writer
Raymond Carver. Carver selected Ford's short story "Communist" for inclusion in
''The Best American Short Stories 1986''.
Contents
The ten stories of ''Rock Springs'' appear in this sequence:
[Richard Ford, ''Rock Springs'' (]Grove Press
Grove Press is an United States of America, American Imprint (trade name), publishing imprint that was founded in 1947. Imprints include: Black Cat, Evergreen, Venus Library, and Zebra. Barney Rosset purchased the company in 1951 and turned it in ...
; reprint edition US, 2009).
*"Rock Springs"
*"Great Falls"
*"Sweet Hearts"
*"Children"
*"Going to the Dogs"
*"Empire"
*"Winterkill"
*"Optimists"
*"Fireworks"
*"Communist"
References
1987 short story collections
American short story collections
{{1980s-story-collection-stub