New York, NY: Knopf (1997)

One of 26 lettered copies signed by the author. In black 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