Richard Ford is on the list of writers whose books I read as they are published, regardless of reviews. To have such a list is, I think, a useful discipline. We ought to trust writers more than we trust critics, especially at a moment when the field of reviewing is weak—lacking in figures like Edmund Wilson, Alfred Kazin, Lionel Trilling, and others who reshaped the American literary sensibility at midcentury. Perhaps readers of any era would do well to give the benefit of the doubt to a writer who has moved or amazed them.