NATIONAL BESTSELLER • PEN/MALAMUD AWARD WINNER • A masterful collection of short stories that explores intimacy and love and their failures—from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Independence Day and “one of the country’s best writers” (San Francisco Chronicle).  With remarkable insight and candor, Richard Ford examines liaisons in and out and to the sides of marriage. An illicit visit to the Grand Canyon reveals a vastness even more profound. A couple weekending in Maine try to recapture the ardor that has disappeared from their life together. And on a spring evening, a young wife tells her husband of her affair with the host of the dinner party they’re about to join. The rigorous intensity Ford brings to these vivid, unforgettable dramas marks this as his most powerfully arresting book to date–confirming the judgment of the New York Times Book Review that “nobody now writing looks more like an American classic.”