Rock Springs (short story collection)

Rock Springs is the first collection of short stories by author Richard Ford, published in 1987.

Rock Springs

First edition
Author	Richard Ford
Language	English
Genre	short stories
Published	Atlantic Monthly Press
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print (hardback & paperback)
Pages	235 (first edition, hardback)
ISBN	978-0871131591 (first edition)
OCLC	15548849
Dewey Decimal	813.54
LC Class	PS3556.O713 R6
Preceded by	The Sportswriter
Followed by	Wildlife

As with his earlier novels A Piece of My Heart (1976) and The Ultimate Good Luck (1981), the stories from Ford's debut collection are notable for both their lack of sentimentality and undercurrent of menace. Raymond Carver selected Ford's short story "Communist" for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories 1986.

In retrospect, Rock Springs has become known as one of Ford's “Montana books,” along with Wildlife (1990), and Canada (2012), since the setting for most of the stories occurs in that state.

Contents

The ten stories of Rock Springs appear in this sequence:

• "Rock Springs"
• "Great Falls"
• "Sweet Hearts"
• "Children"
• "Going to the Dogs"
• "Empire"
• "Winterkill"
• "Optimists"
• "Fireworks"
• "Communist"

All ten of the stories were first published in magazines:

• Esquire: “Rock Springs,” “Winterkill,” “Fireworks,” and “Sweethearts.”
• Antaeus: “Communist.”
• The New Yorker: “Optimists” and “Children.”
• Granta: “Empire” and “Great Falls.”
• TriQuarterly: “Going to the Dogs.”

On the “Acnowledgements” page Ford expresses gratitude to Gary L. Fisketjon and to L. Rust Hills for their editorial help and encouragement.

Reception

Upon the publication of Rock Springs in 1987, reviews were enthusiastic and this collection was well received. In September of that year, George Johnson in The New York Times wrote:

”the finest of them achieve luminous moments, moments with potential to change how the reader sees and thinks. The stories of Rock Springs are extremely concentrated, so a reader who pays attention not only wants to turn pages but to prolong them, experience the supple, ironic, expanding and contracting medium Mr. Ford compounds from everyday speech. What distinguishes his stories from those of many contemporaries who share conventions of style and subject matter is just this personal, vital, idiomatic presence that both mirrors and critiques our habits of language.”

A decade later, The Paris Review —profiling Ford for its iconic interview series— acknowledged that: “His single volume of stories has established him as a master of the genre.”

In her 2012 New Yorker piece profiling Ford and his recently published novel Canada, Lorrie Moore recognized the continued influence of Ford's first story collection some 25 years after it was published:

”Ford has long made dissection of a certain unsavoriness part of his skill as a writer—he can parse spoiled masculinity like the finest of feminists—most famously in the widely anthologized short stories “Rock Springs” and “Communist.” A boy’s experience of adult carelessness has often been his subject.”

In an interview from 2015, Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro was asked “What books do you find yourself returning to again and again?” To which Ishiguro responded: “I tend not to reread whole books over and over, even my big favorites. But I do keep returning to certain short stories, the way I might to favorite pieces of music.” Ishiguro mentioned “Rock Springs” (the actual story) as one of his favorite stories.