ROCK SPRINGS

Ten ?beautifully imagined and crafted stories? of the American West by the Pulitzer Prize?winning author of Independence Day (Joyce Carol Oates).   In these ten exquisite stories, Richard Ford explores the wind-scrubbed landscape of the American West and the guarded hopes and gnawing loneliness of the people who live there: a refugee from justice driving across Wyoming with his daughter and girlfriend in a stolen Mercedes; a boy watching his family dissolve in a night of tragicomic violence; and two men and a woman swapping hard-luck stories in a frontier bar as they try to sweeten their luck.   In the tradition of Raymond Carver, Rock Springs is a masterpiece of taut narration, cleanly chiseled prose, and empathy so generous that it feels like a kind of grace. ?The finest of these stories achieve luminous moments, moments with potential to change how the reader sees and thinks? (The New York Times Book Review).