The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness (The Myths of Bears; Where the Sea Used to Be)

GQ called the three short novels in this collection "wondrous." A woman returns to live on her family's west Texas ranch . . . a man tracks his wife through a winter wilderness . . . an ancient ocean buried in the foothills of the Appalachians becomes a battleground for a young wildcat oilman and his aging mentor. Here is Bass at his magical, passionate, and lyrical best.

GQ called the three short novels in this collection "wondrous." A woman returns to live on her family's west Texas ranch...a man tracks his wife through a winter wilderness...an ancient ocean buried in the foothills of the Appalachians becomes a battleground for a young wildcat oilman and his aging mentor. Here is Bass at his magical, passionate, and lyrical best.

Publishers Weekly

"Spirit world, my butt," thinks one hard-bitten character in the first of these three splendid novellas, but it is exactly that, a spirit world, that Bass grasps in his tales of people in the Western wilderness. In the first, a mentally ailing trapper goes after a troublesome quarry: his wife. In the second, a wildcat oil man, who has never once picked a dry well, finds his rewards not in the money or in his perfect record but in his own enchantment with the land. In the title piece, the longest and most powerful of the three, a 44-year-old woman returns to her family's huge Texas ranch and remembers how she communed with her dead mother's spirit in the nature all around her. She wonders what part of her character is due to "bloodline" and what part "has been sculpted by the land," and how, indeed, she has failed the land by not producing children to continue the legacy. Bass (In the Loyal Mountains) takes a number of breathtaking turns and apparent digressions in this moving story, and readers will encounter a bounty of meditations on time and memory that showcase his graceful, precise, almost musical language, and his magical way of making nature animate. His innate sense of shaping a story brings to these tales the transcendence of myth.

“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 Magical, passionate, and lyrical, the three short novels in this collection are perhaps the finest Rick Bass has written. 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 ranchhand -- 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. A novella and two stories. The title novella, set on a ranch in Texas, is on a woman's love of the land, Where the Sea Used to Be is on the rivalry of two oil men, while in The Myth of the Bears a mountain man tracks a runaway wife who seems to leave an unusual number of helpful clues A collection of three stories in which a woman returns to the Texas ranch where she spent her childhood, a man tracks his missing wife through the wilderness, and a young man sets out to make his fortune in oil Three novellas make up a trilogy that focuses on the land, whether it be the dry, difficult world of a Texas range, a winter wilderness, or an ancient ocean buried in the foothills of the Appalachian mountains.