The Sportswriter and Independence Day are two of my favorite novels, so I’m greatly looking forward to The Lay of the Land, which completes the Frank Bascombe trilogy. This piece in the Guardian profiles Richard Ford as the book’s publication approaches, and in it one finds an important lesson: Be extremely careful when approaching Ford for blurbs:
We go up and see his 1300cc Harley-Davidson… While he tinkers, I ask him about a story I heard — that a publisher once sent him a novel to read in the hope of an endorsement and that he’d sent it back with a bullet hole through it. He laughs. ‘They sent me a book by a writer who had reviewed The Sportswriter rather negatively. It was my wife who took the book out to the backyard and shot it with a pistol. Then by some coincidence, someone else sent a copy. It was so satisfying to watch her that I went out and shot the other one. The book is now on an editor’s shelf at Knopf in New York, big hole blown in one side and blown out the other.’
Smiling, he says he can’t remember the name of the book. ‘But a .38 slug makes quite an impression.’
(via Critical Mass)
