Événement

Politics & Prose Presents RICHARD FORD

St. Paul's Church
4900 Connecticut Avenue NW

Richard Ford has engaged readers for four decades now, most notably with his four-volume Frank Bascombe series, which began with the now-classic THE SPORTSWRITER, followed by the Pulitzer- and PEN/Faulkner-winning INDEPENDENCE DAY. Now this master of fiction makes his nonfiction debut with BETWEEEN THEM, a moving memoir of his parents. The couple met in Little Rock in the late 1930s and were living in Jackson, Mississippi, when their son was born in 1944. Ford's father was a traveling salesman for Faultless Starch, and his mother devoted herself to her family. Painting a rich backdrop with period details of the American South, Ford evokes the lives of his parents as people he knew both intimately and not well at all. His realization that there is much he will never piece understand about his father, who died when Ford was sixteen, makes this a haunting, resonant meditation on family, memory, and abiding ties.

Ford will be in conversation with Matthew Klam, one of the New Yorker'stwenty best fiction writers in America under 40 and author of SAM THE CAT AND OTHER STORIES and the forthcoming WHO IS RICH?.