The Hermit's Story

rick bass

The Hermit’s Story is Rick Bass's best and most varied fiction yet. In the title story, a man and a woman travel across an eerily frozen lake—under the ice. “The Distance” casts a skeptical eye on Thomas Jefferson through the lens of a Montana man’s visit to Monticello. “Eating” begins with an owl being sucked into a canoe and ends with a man eating a town out of house and home, and “The Cave” is a stunning story of a man and woman lost in an abandoned mine. Other stories include “The Fireman,” “Swans,” “The Prisoners,” “Presidents’ Day,” “Real Town,” and “Two Deer.” Some of these stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, but for many readers, they won’t even be the best in this collection. Every story in this book is remarkable in its own way, sure to please both new readers and avid fans of Rick Bass’s passionate, unmistakable voice.

Genres short storiesfictionnatureliteratureshort story collection

179 pages, Paperback

First published January 1,2002

This edition

Format: 179 pages, Paperback
Published: September 18, 2003 by Mariner Books
ISBN: 9780618380442
ASIN: 0618380442
Language: English

About the author

rick bass

Rick Bass was born in Fort Worth, Texas, and grew up in Houston, the son of a geologist. He studied petroleum geology at Utah State University and while working as a petroleum geologist in Jackson, Mississippi, began writing short stories on his lunch breaks. In 1987, he moved with his wife, the artist Elizabeth Hughes Bass, to Montana's remote Yaak Valley and became an active environmentalist, working to protect his adopted home from the destructive encroachment of roads and logging. He serves on the board of both the Yaak Valley Forest Council and Round River Conservation Studies and continues to live with his family on a ranch in Montana, actively engaged in saving the American wilderness.

Bass received the PEN/Nelson Algren Award in 1988 for his first short story, “The Watch,” and won the James Jones Fellowship Award for his novel Where the Sea Used To Be. His novel The Hermit's Story was a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year in 2000. The Lives of Rocks was a finalist for the Story Prize and was chosen as a Best Book of the Year in 2006 by the Rocky Mountain News. Bass's stories have also been awarded the Pushcart Prize and the O. Henry Award and have been collected in The Best American Short Stories.