American Wife: Stories (Ford)

The American Wife: Stories
Elaine Ford, 2007
University of Michigan Press
192 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780472116201


Summary
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 collection of stories, The American Wife, 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, another American wife, abandoned in Greece by her archaeologist husband, struggles to solve a crime no one else believes to have been committed.

Throughout her stories Ford touches on the mysteries that make up our lives. Each story in itself is a masterpiece of such detail and power as to transform the way we see the world. (From the publisher.)