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Summary
Summary
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 Newsweek has called "an American classic." 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.
Reviews (3)
Kirkus Review
A benchmark collection of stories by Bass (All the Land to Hold Us, 2013, etc.), one of the most capable practitioners of the form at work today. A story by Bass takes one of several forms. One is a delineation of loss, usually but not always lost love, by someone stumbling through it, usually but not always a middle-aged man. In another, a woman, just this side of young, moves toward freedom born of self-discoveryand in this, few male writers, Jim Harrison excepted, are much good at even guessing what that might mean. "She felt as if she were younger," one of Bass' protagonists thinks, "going back to a place, some place she had not been in a long time but could remember fondly. It felt like she was in love." Constrained by place, religion, circumstance, there are young people who shape their own worlds under the noses of grown-ups: says one Mormon girl of the secret life of an elder, "I'm not supposed to know thatI'm the only one who knows." If it's a Bass story, there's usually a hawk afloat in the sky or dogs running around"Texas hounds," for instance, "that I'd brought up north with me a few years before." Long associated with both the Deep South and the mountainous West, Bass writes movingly of the land, weather, and place as welleven when the place isn't always attractive, such as the dark edges of little Western towns, "strange seams of disintegrating roughness on the perimeters." All of these elements come to the fore in the 100-odd pages of new stories that close the book, all wind-swept plains and grim forests, mountain lions, badly loved girls, and wondrous resolutionsfor one, that "there is no end, and we all deserve everything our hearts desire." Essential reading for students of the modern American short story and some of the best work of a writer who is at the top of his game. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Rick Bass readers will feel jubilant at the sight of this gathering of short stories spanning three decades, with 18 from five previous collections and seven glorious new tales. As a former petroleum geologist, Texas-born and -raised, Montana-rooted Bass envisions life on a vast time scale, perceives the preciousness of the planet, and contemplates our ravenous exploitation of nature in our quest for light and warmth, security and sustenance. Reverence and compassion shape each masterfully formed tale in which Bass handles language itself as a gift as essential as water or blood. His characters in moral or mortal peril seek connection to the fecundity and beauty of the earth as they are transfixed by sunsets, rivers, trees, fire, dragonflies, fish, and mountain lions, even as we devour the wild. In such previous stories as Wild Horses, a stunning examination of grief, and the exquisitely magical The Hermit's Story, Bass combines precision, realism, and profound imagination. In his new stories, he attains a fresh intensity of emotional nuance as he portrays individuals weighing desire and duty, regret and gratitude. Bass writes tenderly of fathers and their breath-catching, if inept, love for their daughters; strong women and the men who cautiously orbit them; and those who long for spiritual richness in a world that values material wealth. A collection of enrapturing radiance and depth, a beacon and a hearth.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
SPAIN IN OUR HEARTS: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939, by Adam Hochschild. (Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $15.99.) Hochschild, the author of "King Leopold's Ghost," structures this account of the conflict as a collective biography of Americans who fought for the Republican side. He investigates the romantic appeal of the cause and the reasons for its failure. HYSTOPIA, by David Means. (Picador, $18.) In this novel within a novel - framed as a manuscript by a fictional Vietnam veteran, Eugene Allen, written shortly before he committed suicide - John F. Kennedy is entering his third term as president and has founded a program, the Psych Corps, to treat traumatized soldiers. Allen's story centers on two corps agents who have fallen in love and set off to recover a young woman who has been abducted. LOUISA: The Extraordinary Life of Mrs. Adams, by Louisa Thomas. (Penguin, $18.) Born in London, the woman who married John Quincy Adams lived across Europe with her family, then her diplomat husband, before coming to the United States. These experiences helped set her apart, as did the trove of writing she left behind. Thomas draws on Louisa's memoirs, travelogues and extensive correspondence to offer a rich interior portrait. FOR A LITTLE WHILE: New and Selected Stories, by Rick Bass. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $18.99.) In this collection of tales, humans act on their animal natures, and the natural world is suffused with the holy; in one story, an ice storm and powerful arctic front leads a dog trainer and her client to an encounter with the sublime. As our reviewer, Smith Henderson, put it, Bass, "a master of the short form," writes not only "to save our wild places, but to save what's wild and humane and best within us." YOU MAY ALSO LIKE: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice, by Tom Vanderbilt. (Vintage, $16.95.) Vanderbilt, a journalist, has written a guide to the invisible forces shaping personal preferences - and the companies trying desperately to understand, and profit from, taste. Taste is both contextual and categorical, he argues, leading to a baffling capriciousness in what people like and why. ELIGIBLE, by Curtis Sittenfeld. (Random House, $17.) A retelling of "Pride and Prejudice" unfolds in the Cincinnati suburbs: Liz, a magazine writer in New York, comes home to find her family in disarray, and meets Darcy, now in the guise of a neurosurgeon from San Francisco who is profoundly underwhelmed by the Midwest. Sittenfeld's version seamlessly transplants Jane Austen's story to a modern American setting.