New York, NY: Knopf (1997)

One of 150 numbered copies signed by the author. In royal blue slipcase.

"This is Ford's voice at its best.... Nobody now writing looks more like an American classic". -- The New York Times Book Review In his first volume of short fiction since the acclaimed Rock Springs, Richard Ford creates a portrait gallery of male characters who are as wounded, as rueful, and as touchingly vulnerable as Frank Bascombe, the protagonist of his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Independence Day. Here is the traveling salesman who congratulates himself on his happy marriage even as he probes the defenses of a vulnerable divorcee. Here is the stoic seventeen-year-old who is just beginning to apprehend the chaotic undercurrents of his parents' lives. Here is an aspiring novelist, stranded in a foreign country with a lover who may need him far more than she lets on. Passionate and ironic, written with an economy of words and vast reserves of feeling, Women with Men creates a poetry of American manhood in the traditions of Hemingway, O'Hara, and Sam Shepard. "Breathtaking.... Women with Men is sumptuous and quietly realized, and it's signature Ford". -- Boston Globe "One of America's most accomplished practitioners of the art of the story". -- Newsday