A quartet of masterful novellas that returns Richard Ford to the territory that sealed his reputation as an American master: the life of Frank Bascombe, hero of his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel INDEPENDENCE DAY. A moving, peerlessly funny odyssey through America and through the layered consciousness of one of its most compelling literary incarnations, the four stories bear Bascombe's unmistakable and now-famous imprint: a comic sensibility at odds with the minutiae of everyday human dismay and bewilderment.