Cover of For a Little While: New and Selected Stories

For a Little While: New and Selected Stories

Long considered one of the most gifted practitioners of the short story, Rick Bass is unsurpassed in his ability to perceive and portray the enduring truths of the human heart. Now, at last, we have the definitive collection of stories, new and old, from the writer Newsweekhas called "an American classic."

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To read his fiction is to feel more alive-connected, incandescently, to "the brief longshot of having been chosen for the human experience," as one of his characters puts it.These pages reveal men and women living with passion and tenderness at the outer limits of the senses, each attempting to triumph against fate. Bass provides searing insights into the complexity of family and romantic entanglements, and his lush and striking language draws us ineluctably into the lives of these engaging people and their vivid surroundings. The intricate stories collected in For A Little While—brimming with magic and wonder, filled with hard-won empathy, marbled throughout with astonishing imagery—have the power both to devastate and to uplift. Together they showcase an iconic American master at his peak.

Table of Contents

Selected Stories(pp 3 - 342)

Wild Horses

In Ruth's Country

Red Fish

The Watch

The Legend of Pig-Eye

The History of Rodney

Fires

Field Events

The Hermit's Story

The Fireman

Swans

Elk

Pagans

The Canoeists

Goats

Her First Elk

Titan

The Lives of Rocks

New Stories(pp 343 - 468)

How She Remembers it

The Blue Tree

Lease Hound

The River in Winter

Coach

An Alcoholic's guide to Peru & Chile

Fish Story

Acknowledgments

Audience
adult
Length
long · 480 pages

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