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Book Summary and Reviews of Let Me Be Frank With You by Richard Ford

Let Me Be Frank With You by Richard Ford

Let Me Be Frank With You

A Frank Bascombe Book

by Richard Ford

  • Critics' Consensus (2):
  • Published:
  • Nov 2014, 256 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

In his trio of world-acclaimed novels portraying the life of an entire American generation, Richard Ford has imagined one of the most indelible and widely discussed characters in modern literature, Frank Bascombe. Through Bascombe - protean, funny, profane, wise, often inappropriate - we've witnessed the aspirations, sorrows, longings, achievements and failings of an American life in the twilight of the twentieth century.

Now, in Let Me Be Frank with You, Ford reinvents Bascombe in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. In four richly luminous narratives, Bascombe (and Ford) attempts to reconcile, interpret and console a world undone by calamity. It is a moving and wondrous and extremely funny odyssey through the America we live in at this moment. Ford is here again working with the maturity and brilliance of a writer at the absolute height of his powers.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Starred Review. Like Frank, Ford, certainly is incisively frank, forensically observant, and covertly tender." - Booklist

"Readers who met Frank in Ford's earlier novels will quickly reconnect with his indelible personality." - Publishers Weekly

"Another Bascombe novel would be a surprise, but so is this - a welcome one. " - Kirkus

"Ford is celebrated for his Frank Bascombe novels - stories swirling around the life of a middle-aged real estate agent. His profession lends itself to Ford's rich descriptions of natural land." - Huffington Post, Best Books for Fall 2014

This information about Let Me Be Frank With You was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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Author Information

Richard Ford Author Biography

Photo © Robert Yager

Richard Ford was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1944, the only child of a traveling salesman for a starch company, and was raised in Mississippi and in Arkansas. He went to college at Michigan State University, where he met Kristina Hensley, to whom he has been married since 1968. Ford attended law school very briefly before entering the University of California at Irvine, where he received his M.F.A. in writing in 1970.

After publishing two novels, A Piece of My Heart (1976) and The Ultimate Good Luck (1981), Ford took a job writing for Inside Sports Magazine. When the magazine was sold, he decided to write a book about a sportswriter; the resulting novel, published in 1986, received widespread acclaim: it was named one of five best books of 1986 by Time magazine. The Sportswriter ...

... Full Biography
Author Interview

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