6 x 9. 192 pgs. (2007) Paper 978-0-472-11620-1 $18.95T  Available Add to Cart Ebook Formats 978-0-472-02169-7 Available Add to Cart Search this Book's Content About the Book Praise Look Inside Series Michigan Literary Fiction Awards Subjects Fiction

The American Wife

Elaine Ford

A stirring collection of keenly observed stories from the 2007 winner of the Michigan Literary Fiction Award for short fiction

---

About the Book

Of Elaine Ford's novel, Missed Connections, the Washington Post wrote that it is a work "of small episodes, of precise sentences, of unusual clarity." That same clarity proves an unsettling force in Ford's stories, where precision of prose often belies uncertainties hidden beneath. In the title piece, an American woman in England, embroiled in a relationship doomed to fail, discovers how little she understands about her own desires and impulses. In another story, an American wife, abandoned in Greece by her archaeologist husband, struggles to solve a crime no one else believes to have been committed. A strong evocation of place suffuses all these stories, which are set in suburban New Jersey, Boston, Annapolis, and New York City, as well as four European locales.

"Miss Ford makes every inch of her fictional territory count."
—New York Times Book Review

"Ford's prose has a poised, finely tuned quality that doesn't scream because it doesn't need to . . . Her keen grasp of the inescapable and convoluted effects of family ties is one of the finest achievements of the book."
—Harper's

"[The American Wife] roams the territory between the intellect and the heart. [Ford] writes of the human condition with precision, in language that is both grave and conversational.  Her characters step out of the real world onto the page, where she develops them quietly, but with compassionate fullness."
—Laura Kasischke, author of The Life Before Her Eyes and Be Mine

Elaine Ford is the author of five novels. For her fiction she has received two National Endowment for the Arts grants and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is Professor Emerita at the University of Maine, where she taught creative writing and literature. She lives in Harpswell, Maine.

Cover photo © Sally Peyou