RICHARD FORD
Wednesday, October 25 at 7:30 p.m. Downstairs at Town Hall Seattle, 1119 Eighth Avenue

Twenty years ago, back in the early days of Elliott Bay readings—when it was rare that a literary author might be brought to town for a reading—there was enticing and cajoling employed to get a certain underknown novelist over from his then-current home in Montana. A writer friend living near here, Raymond Carver, was part of the cajoling. Richard Ford came to Seattle in 1986 with this then-new, then- and still-captivating novel, The Sportswriter. Richard Ford has been this way numerous times since then, with a number of fine novels. A high point was in 1996, when he returned with Independence Day, which again featured Frank Bascombe, hero of The Sportswriter. Tonight we are delighted to welcome Richard Ford and the personae of Frank Bascombe back, as the former reads about the latter in the marvelous new novel, The Lay of the Land (Knopf). "Frank Bascombe meticulously maps New Jersey with a realtor's rapacious eye, and there is an equally intense topographer of his teeming inner landscape. In the first of Ford's magisterial Bascombe novels (The Sportswriter), Frank staved off feelings of loss and regret with a disassociated 'dreaminess.' He graduated to a more conventional detachment during what he calls the "Existence period" of the PEN/Faulkner and Pulitzer Prize-winning Independence Day. Now we find the 55-year-old former fiction writer and sports journalist in a "Permanent Period," a time of being, not becoming...Ford summons a remarkable voice for his protagonist—ruminant, jaunty, merciless, generous and painfully observant—building a dense narrative from Frank's improvisations, epiphanies and revisions..." - Publishers Weekly. A night not to be missed. $5 tickets are available at Elliott Bay starting September 30. Town Hall is located at 1119 Eighth Avenue, entry for this evening on Seneca Street. For more information on tonight, please call Elliott Bay at (206) 624-6600.

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