I'm rereading my mentor Richard Ford's A Multitude of Sins. I sometimes forget what an able writer of short stories he is. Raymond Carver said Richard was the best American writer of sentences years ago. Only now am I beginning to appreciate what he meant. One could extend that comment to paragraphs, which Richard manages to use more meaningfully than most writers do pages.

You may have read Richard's Pen-Faulkner Award winning novel, The Sportswriter and his Pulitzer Prize winning sequel, Independence Day. Don't stop there. His other novels and short fiction are also worthy of your attention. The story that has struck me most a third of the way through rereading Multitude is "Calling." It takes what could be melodramatic material, the tale of a teenaged boy whose father has left his mother for another man in 1961, and mines it not for emotion, but for clarity. One of the most revealing insights is that the ill-starred hunting trip in the story is not the moment of truth. If there was a single deciding moment, it has already already happened. More likely, there were several, and they may have been so inexorable as to be fait accomplis before the parties knew what was going on. This is the kind of brilliant revelation I'm always surprised to see Richard produce seemingly effortlessly. If you haven't been reading Richard Ford, do. If you have, do it some more.

Books I've recently ordered include Booker Prize Nominee Monica Ali's Brick Lane, former Portland Police Chief Charles Moose's Three Weeks in October: The Manhunt for the Serial Sniper and Stolen, a light sci-fi work by Kelly Armstrong, a new writer who wrote an enjoyable first novel, Bitten.

Note: A version of this entry appeared on Silver Rights.