The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness: Novellas

“Two appealing short stories and an exquisite novella” about the relationship between humans and the natural world around them (Kirkus Reviews).

This is a “wondrous” (GQ) collection of short fiction exploring the subtle interplay between predator and prey, from “a literary titan” (The New York Times Book Review).

In the title story, a woman has returned to live on the west Texas ranch that has been in her family since Texas was a republic. Her mother, who died when she was a child, is buried there; the three men who raised her—her father, grandfather, and Old Chubb, a Mexican ranch hand—are gone; and her brother, like herself, is childless. Soon, all that will be left of the family is the land: “I suppose the land is all we will leave behind, ” she reflects. “In that way, it is both our parents and our children. ”

Land is central to the other tales here as well. In The Myths of Bears, a man tracks his wife through a winter wilderness as she both lures and eludes him. And in Where the Sea Used to Be, an ancient ocean buried in the foothills of the Appalachians becomes a battleground for a young wildcat oilman and his aging mentor.

“Rick Bass is a force of nature. [This book] is a force of language. As a reader, a third thing comes to mind: gratitude for a good story that allows us to ponder what is above and what is below. ” —Terry Tempest Williams

“What’s exhilarating about Rick Bass’s stories is that they show every hallmark of ‘the natural’—that lucid, free-flowing, particularly American talent whose voice we can hear in Twain, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway. ” —Chicago Tribune

© 1998 Mariner Books (Ebook): 9780547346816

Release date

Ebook: 30 September 1998