Rick Bass

"For acclaimed writer and environmental activist Rick Bass, it can be wearying to dwell relentlessly upon the broken, the fragmented, the dead and dying and doomed to extinction. Activism is a necessary part of the environmental movement, but so is the time-honored celebration of the beauty that inspires us. Spanning his storied career, these new and selected essays attempt to take a brief step to the side, away from lamentation and prescription,...

Roaming across the salt flats and skirting the salt lake Richard a geologist working for an oil company hunts for fossils under the spell of Clarissa the local beauty who plans to use her share of their plunder to get out of small dusty Midland for good. A generation earlier a Depression era couple Max and Marie Omo numbly mines for salt along the banks of the briny lake until the emotional terrain of their marriage is suddenly and irrevocably altered....

"A selection of the best and most representative contemporary American short fiction from 1970 to 2020, including such authors as Ursula K. LeGuin, Toni Cade Bambara, Jhumpa Lahiri, Sandra Cisneros, and Ted Chiang, hand-selected by celebrated editor and anthologist John Freeman."-- Provided by publisher.