A collection of stories about lives shattered by divorce or death, with protagonists discovering that the pieces they are trying to put together no longer fit, and perhaps never did..... Powerfully unsettling stories in which men nearing the end of their lives wonder, befuddled, if that's all there is." -- Kirkus Reviews

"Once again, virtuoso Ford deftly sails the seas and storms of consciousness." -- Booklist (starred review)

"...both a coherent work of art and a subtle and convincing portrait of contemporary American life among the moneyed middle class...This is America, and Richard Ford is its chronicler. In these superbly wrought tales he catches, with exquisite precision, what Emerson in his scholarly address failed to mention, the irresistible melancholy that is the mark of American life." -- Wall Street Journal

"Richard Ford remains an author hostage to the mysterious simplicities of emotional sentiment, commendably so." -- Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"Ford has a gift for nimble interior monologues and a superb ear for the varieties and vagaries of human speech. His prose can strike a Hemingwayesque cadence...One page later, a sparkling note of Fitzgerald...Ford is of the last generation of writers to have grown up directly under the Papa-and-Scott dispensation, and it's gratifying to hear his sentences pay homage...Acutely described settings, pitch-perfect dialogue, inner lives vividly evoked, complex protagonists brought toward difficult recognitions: There's a kind of narrative, often dismissed as the "well-crafted, writing-class story," that deals in muted epiphanies and trains its gaze inward, to pangs and misgivings." -- New York Times Book Review