Direct Download: 20061030-richard.mp3

In The Lay of the Land, his first novel in ten years, Richard Ford reprises his famed everyman protagonist, Frank Bascombe, whose story began with the best-selling novel The Sportswriter in 1985, and continued in the 1995 Pulitzer Prize winner Independence Day. In The Lay of the Land, we discover Bascombe - who “has earned himself a place beside Willy Loman and Harry Angstrom in our literary landscape,” according to the New York Times Book Review - in the fall of 2000, contending with health, marital, and family issues, while the presidential election hangs in the balance