By James Camp 5/22/12 5:24pm

books

"Canada." (Courtesy Ecco)

True North: Horrible Things Happen in Richard Ford’s Impressive Seventh Novel

Near the end of Canada (Ecco, 432 pp., $27.99), the new novel by Richard Ford, the narrator suggests a few literary parallels to the story he’s just finished telling. It’s quite a crib note:

[These books] to me seem secretly about my young life—The Heart of Darkness, The Great Gatsby, The Sheltering Sky, The Nick Adams Stories, The Mayor of Casterbridge. A mission into the void. Abandonment. A figure, possibly mysterious, but finally not… Read More

By Andre Bernard 11/06/06 12:00am

And Now It’s a Trilogy: The Bascombe Saga Continued

Back in 1986, it seemed that a lot of us—and by us, I mean late-twentysomething and early-thirtysomething publishing employees in New York—were drifting. Relationships were sputtering or had foundered, our jobs felt undetermined, and we spent a lot of time over drinks in bars, wondering about the sudden journalistic appetite for glitz and money in Read More

By Andre Bernard 11/06/06 12:00am

And Now It’s a Trilogy: The Bascombe Saga Continued

Back in 1986, it seemed that a lot of us—and by us, I mean late-twentysomething and early-thirtysomething publishing employees in New York—were drifting. Relationships were sputtering or had foundered, our jobs felt undetermined, and we spent a lot of time over drinks in bars, wondering about the sudden journalistic appetite for glitz and money in Read More