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megzxo's review against another edition
3.0
Probably closer to 3.5. Descriptive, lush, a little slow & lazy. A nice little short read.
reallbee's review against another edition
3.0
I'm still thinking about some of these stories; about the characters and how their lives progressed past these brief moments in time. These were the stories that were really really good, so good that it surprised me. But, there were others that I struggled to get through and loathed to continue reading. I'd still recommend this book to certain people, and would recommend particular stories to many, but can't bring myself to give more than 3 stars overall.
jennyshank's review against another edition
5.0
Published: 26 February 2016, Dallas Morning News
If any contemporary writer of short fiction deserves to take the victory lap symbolized by a collection of selected stories, it’s Rick Bass, who has published seven books worth of stories and novellas, many of which have been honored with inclusion in prize anthologies.
For a Little While gathers 25 of Bass’ strongest stories, including seven new tales, into a collection that should win Bass new fans while inducing his admirers to re-evaluate what they thought they knew about this versatile and sensitive writer whose fiction thrusts relentlessly fallible humans against the astounding and confounding forces of nature.
I had already read most of these stories, even the new ones, which I sought out in the literary magazines that first published them. I considered myself a kind of authority on his fiction. But one of the marks of a rich, layered, rewarding story is that you can read it at different ages and stages of your life and be struck by distinct facets of it, and perhaps derive an entirely new meaning from it.
This phenomenon hit me over and over again as I read For a Little While, whose stories have more to give than can be gleaned in one reading. Maybe a good story is like a rock, always changing its impact on the reader as life sediments are deposited, heated, cooled and eroded over the years. “No rock is ever finished, all stones are continually being remade,” Bass writes, in The Lives of Rocks, “until they vanish from the face of the earth.”
One thing I thought I knew about Bass was that he mainly set his writing in the Montana wilderness. Bass was born in Fort Worth, grew up in Houston, studied petroleum geology at Utah State University, and worked in that field in Mississippi before moving to the remote Yaak Valley of Montana in 1987. But although I’d pegged Bass as writing about elk-shooting hermits living without indoor plumbing in the Rocky Mountain West, this collection is roughly evenly divided between stories set in Montana, Texas and Mississippi, with plenty of stories set in suburbs instead of the forest.
Bass’ nonfiction is more often set in Montana — maybe the distinction is that a writer chooses where to set his nonfiction, but his subconscious chooses where he will set his fiction, and formative experiences carry an outsize weight.
Yes, there are a few stories featuring craggy hermits and the field-dressing of ungulates, but I think I might have missed the real point of these the first time I read them. Bass’ characters never shoot an elk just for the sake of shooting an elk. Most of the time, they do it for sheer survival, as does a newcomer to a rugged Montana valley in “Elk,” who convinces a local to help him bag his winter meat and endures a comedy of errors as they stalk, kill and try to transport an elk. (“And so we moved across the valley, slowly, as if in some eternal meat relay.”)
We first meet Jyl in “Her First Elk” as a skittish teenager who’s just lost her father, trying to fend for herself in the wilderness. She shoots an enormous elk, and some competent elder outdoorsmen take pity on her and teach her how to dress it. Bass writes that Jyl is “remembering these things, a grown woman now woven of losses and gains.”
Jyl returns in the enchanting novella, “The Lives of Rocks,” in which we learn that those losses include a bout with cancer she’s just emerging from. Chemotherapy saps her strength to prepare for the winter or do little else but carve wooden boats, which she sets sail “to provide entertainment and even a touch of magic for the hardened lives of the Workman children living downstream from her.”
Two of the children from this off-the-grid, evangelical family receive her boats, and turn up to provide her company and help. In this story, Jyl spares the life of perhaps the only deer she’ll be able to shoot in her weakened condition, but the children bring her meat.
In all these stories, game provides sustenance, but also communion between weaker, younger or less experienced people and those with the strength and skills to help.
Bass’ Texas stories often feature young men or children thriving in the freedom and ignorance of their youth, as in “Pagans,” a story about three teenagers who find “a rusting old crane half sunk near the estuary of the Sabine River, salt-bound, a derelict from gravel quarry days,” and repeatedly ditch school to return to this poisoned waterway and while away their afternoons. “They had found a lazy place, a sweet place, to hang out, in the eddy between childhood and whatever came next.” These teens are too young and in love to read anything ominous into the deformed aquatic life they find in the river.
The Mississippi stories can be Southern Gothic as all get-out, including “The Watch,” about a fading competitive cyclist who helps the isolated owner of a country store recapture his runaway, elderly, alligator-wrestling dad who has escaped into the Bayou.
Written in prose that sounds lovely even when describing “scablands of lukewarm coal water and rivulets of toxic runoff,” Bass’ stories emphasize the bonds between spouses, parents and their children, neighbors and friends, and delve the intense longing for connection in people living alone or in wavering marriages.
The stories are varied in subject and setting, but they are united in their emphasis on the fleeting nature of our lives and of the stages within them. Being young, being in love, being healthy and raising young children, states that seem without horizon at the time, are all ephemeral interludes in the evolving bedrock of our lives. Bass savors the sweet beauty of these moments, while considering the rue over the missed opportunities embedded within them.
Jenny Shank’s novel, “The Ringer,” won the High Plains Book Award. Her short story “L’Homme de Ma Vie” will appear in the new issue of Barrelhouse.
http://www.dallasnews.com/lifestyles/books/20160226-short-stories-for-a-little-while-by-rick-bass.ece
If any contemporary writer of short fiction deserves to take the victory lap symbolized by a collection of selected stories, it’s Rick Bass, who has published seven books worth of stories and novellas, many of which have been honored with inclusion in prize anthologies.
For a Little While gathers 25 of Bass’ strongest stories, including seven new tales, into a collection that should win Bass new fans while inducing his admirers to re-evaluate what they thought they knew about this versatile and sensitive writer whose fiction thrusts relentlessly fallible humans against the astounding and confounding forces of nature.
I had already read most of these stories, even the new ones, which I sought out in the literary magazines that first published them. I considered myself a kind of authority on his fiction. But one of the marks of a rich, layered, rewarding story is that you can read it at different ages and stages of your life and be struck by distinct facets of it, and perhaps derive an entirely new meaning from it.
This phenomenon hit me over and over again as I read For a Little While, whose stories have more to give than can be gleaned in one reading. Maybe a good story is like a rock, always changing its impact on the reader as life sediments are deposited, heated, cooled and eroded over the years. “No rock is ever finished, all stones are continually being remade,” Bass writes, in The Lives of Rocks, “until they vanish from the face of the earth.”
One thing I thought I knew about Bass was that he mainly set his writing in the Montana wilderness. Bass was born in Fort Worth, grew up in Houston, studied petroleum geology at Utah State University, and worked in that field in Mississippi before moving to the remote Yaak Valley of Montana in 1987. But although I’d pegged Bass as writing about elk-shooting hermits living without indoor plumbing in the Rocky Mountain West, this collection is roughly evenly divided between stories set in Montana, Texas and Mississippi, with plenty of stories set in suburbs instead of the forest.
Bass’ nonfiction is more often set in Montana — maybe the distinction is that a writer chooses where to set his nonfiction, but his subconscious chooses where he will set his fiction, and formative experiences carry an outsize weight.
Yes, there are a few stories featuring craggy hermits and the field-dressing of ungulates, but I think I might have missed the real point of these the first time I read them. Bass’ characters never shoot an elk just for the sake of shooting an elk. Most of the time, they do it for sheer survival, as does a newcomer to a rugged Montana valley in “Elk,” who convinces a local to help him bag his winter meat and endures a comedy of errors as they stalk, kill and try to transport an elk. (“And so we moved across the valley, slowly, as if in some eternal meat relay.”)
We first meet Jyl in “Her First Elk” as a skittish teenager who’s just lost her father, trying to fend for herself in the wilderness. She shoots an enormous elk, and some competent elder outdoorsmen take pity on her and teach her how to dress it. Bass writes that Jyl is “remembering these things, a grown woman now woven of losses and gains.”
Jyl returns in the enchanting novella, “The Lives of Rocks,” in which we learn that those losses include a bout with cancer she’s just emerging from. Chemotherapy saps her strength to prepare for the winter or do little else but carve wooden boats, which she sets sail “to provide entertainment and even a touch of magic for the hardened lives of the Workman children living downstream from her.”
Two of the children from this off-the-grid, evangelical family receive her boats, and turn up to provide her company and help. In this story, Jyl spares the life of perhaps the only deer she’ll be able to shoot in her weakened condition, but the children bring her meat.
In all these stories, game provides sustenance, but also communion between weaker, younger or less experienced people and those with the strength and skills to help.
Bass’ Texas stories often feature young men or children thriving in the freedom and ignorance of their youth, as in “Pagans,” a story about three teenagers who find “a rusting old crane half sunk near the estuary of the Sabine River, salt-bound, a derelict from gravel quarry days,” and repeatedly ditch school to return to this poisoned waterway and while away their afternoons. “They had found a lazy place, a sweet place, to hang out, in the eddy between childhood and whatever came next.” These teens are too young and in love to read anything ominous into the deformed aquatic life they find in the river.
The Mississippi stories can be Southern Gothic as all get-out, including “The Watch,” about a fading competitive cyclist who helps the isolated owner of a country store recapture his runaway, elderly, alligator-wrestling dad who has escaped into the Bayou.
Written in prose that sounds lovely even when describing “scablands of lukewarm coal water and rivulets of toxic runoff,” Bass’ stories emphasize the bonds between spouses, parents and their children, neighbors and friends, and delve the intense longing for connection in people living alone or in wavering marriages.
The stories are varied in subject and setting, but they are united in their emphasis on the fleeting nature of our lives and of the stages within them. Being young, being in love, being healthy and raising young children, states that seem without horizon at the time, are all ephemeral interludes in the evolving bedrock of our lives. Bass savors the sweet beauty of these moments, while considering the rue over the missed opportunities embedded within them.
Jenny Shank’s novel, “The Ringer,” won the High Plains Book Award. Her short story “L’Homme de Ma Vie” will appear in the new issue of Barrelhouse.
http://www.dallasnews.com/lifestyles/books/20160226-short-stories-for-a-little-while-by-rick-bass.ece
rdebner's review against another edition
4.0
I read this collection in two chunks, half in June and half in August. For excellent short story writers like Rick Bass, I like to take my time and not just plow through all the stories at once. In this thick collection, it was nice to see some characters appear in multiple stories, at very different points in their lives.
pearseanderson's review against another edition
5.0
Pure gold. Rick Bass's prose is like clear liquid. I am humbled, brought down to earth, and set into awe by the same revolutions of the earth, her geology, and the Yaak Valley people's pursuit of small thing in life: TV dinners, firewood, seeing a bear outside. One of the best story collections I have read this year, and one I know I'll return to as I need to be reinvigorated to write and write well. Bass covers natural cycles and traditions I might never see due to the climate crisis, but their love and comforts are felt across these pages.
Two final notes: Bass's stories rarely have traditional conflicts, and instead deal with characters going about their day in the natural world, the exception to this being hunt or survival stories. Also almost every old person in this collection had severe memory issues and was suffering from some form of dementia.
The audiobook version of this book was heavenly, really well mixed with interlude stories accompanied by soft ambient music and swales that I just adored.
Two final notes: Bass's stories rarely have traditional conflicts, and instead deal with characters going about their day in the natural world, the exception to this being hunt or survival stories. Also almost every old person in this collection had severe memory issues and was suffering from some form of dementia.
The audiobook version of this book was heavenly, really well mixed with interlude stories accompanied by soft ambient music and swales that I just adored.
kristengbaker's review against another edition
3.0
A collection of stories spanning 30-years. Nature is ever-present in the stories, but not at the expense of well-written characters. The setting doesn't overwhelm the storytelling, it enhances it in so many ways.