Sorry for Your Trouble

Stories

By: Richard Ford

Narrated by: Stephen Mendel

Length: 8 hrs and 35 mins

Publisher's summary

A landmark new collection of stories from Richard Ford that showcases his brilliance, sensitivity, and trademark wit and candor!

In Sorry for Your Trouble, Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times best-selling author Richard Ford enacts a stunning meditation on memory, love, and loss.

“Displaced” returns us to a young man’s Mississippi adolescence, and to a shocking encounter with a young Irish immigrant who recklessly tries to solace the narrator’s sorrow after his father’s death.

“Driving Up” follows an American woman’s late-in-life journey to Canada to bid good-bye to a lost love now facing the end of this life.

“The Run of Yourself”, a novella, sees a New Orleans lawyer navigating the difficulties of living beyond his Irish wife’s death.

And “Nothing to Declare” follows a man and a woman’s chance re-meeting in the New Orleans French Quarter, after 20 years, and their discovery of what’s left of love for them.

Typically rich with Ford’s emotional lucidity and lyrical precision, Sorry for Your Trouble is a memorable collection from one of our greatest writers.

©2020 Richard Ford (P)2020 HarperAudio

not his best work

Richard Ford is a brilliant writer, but these stories are not great. There are too many characters without enough emotional resonance to any. especially on audio, it's tough to keep everyone straight.

Gets under your skin

Bleak and penetrating and provoking and other critic-friendly adjectives and superlatives can be applied to these stories. I feel changed for having read/listened to them and that’s a sure sign of relevance.

Dour But Introspective

There were some instances of brilliance and insight but weighted down by the bleakness of too many failed relationships.

Beautifully conceived collection

I’ll admit at the outset that I really enjoy Ford’s writing. I’ve read most of his novels and this collection of stories is very much of a piece with them. He is a master of painting a picture of “normal” Middle and Upper Class Life, mostly as seen through the eyes of Middle-Aged or older characters. Once he draws you into the World of his People, he proceeds to peel back their outer shells to expose their hopes and dreams, successes (few) and failures (more).

His World isn’t filled with Tulips and Butterflies but with the real pressures Twenty-First America visits upon all of us. Sorry for Your Trouble treats relationships, as they succeed and fail, sometimes through Death, sometimes through the flaws of the Couples. His scenarios are painfully convincing and thought-provoking but still satisfying to the Reader. Four Stars.

Great writing but the Irish accents?

Great collection of stories from a master story teller. Mendel is a fine narrator but needs to do more work on Irish accents which are a central element in this audiobook.
For the most part his attempts are laughably bad and distract from the stories. He has probably never met an Irish person in the flesh - this would not normally be problematic but his accents need a little work.