[4] But in April 2013, Ford read from a new Frank Bascombe story without revealing to the audience if it was —or was not— part of a longer work.

Let Me Be Frank With You is a work consisting of four interconnected novellas (or "long stories" as Ford prefers to call them) all narrated by Frank Bascombe:[6][4] These four stories appear in the following sequence: By the time this book was published in 2014, readers were well-acquainted with Ford’s “signature character”, who first appeared in 1986’s The Sportswriter.

It did not win the prize, but the Pulitzer selection committee praised the book for its "unflinching series of narratives, set in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, insightfully portraying a society in decline.

In their review, BookBrowse first took note of the three previous novels in the series: “In his trio of world-acclaimed novels portraying the life of an entire American generation, Richard Ford has imagined one of the most indelible and widely discussed characters in modern literature, Frank Bascombe.” Then they described this new work, writing that: “In four richly luminous narratives, Bascombe (and Ford) attempts to reconcile, interpret and console a world undone by calamity.

It is a moving and wondrous and extremely funny odyssey through the America we live in at this moment […] Ford is here again working with the maturity and brilliance of a writer at the absolute height of his powers.”[10]