Houghton Mifflin

Rick Bass's tribute to his bird dog Colter — a slim, beautiful book about a man and his dog in the Montana wilderness. Bass writes about animals the way most people wish they could talk about the ones they love.

Rick Bass's short stories set in Montana's Yaak Valley — the landscape he's spent his life defending. The fiction has the same fierce attachment to place as his nonfiction.

Rick Bass's early memoir of working as a petroleum geologist in Mississippi — before Montana, before the Yaak, before he became an environmental writer. The irony of a future conservationist hunting for oil is never stated but always present.

Paul Theroux drove the length of the U.S.-Mexico border and deep into Mexico, talking to migrants, cartel survivors, factory workers, and priests. Theroux at his most engaged — the cynicism replaced by something closer to grief.

Three novellas set in Montana — hunting, fishing, and the landscape of the Northern Rockies rendered in prose so vivid it feels like weather.

Heat-Moon traveled across America entirely by water — rivers, canals, lakes, portages — from New York to Oregon. A coast-to-coast journey on the country's forgotten highway system.

In the 30 years since this collection was released, Rick Bass’s name has become firmly lodged in American literature, especially in the canons of the environment and the West, yet too few know these three short pieces of fiction that stem from early in the petroleum geologist-turned-writer’s career. In “The Myth of Bears,” a wife tries to run away from her trapper husband and the harsh Yukon wilderness. With “Where the Sea Used to Be,” Wallis Featherstone and his dog Dudley search for oil in the Mississippi Delta: “Looking for the thing, the things no one else knew to look for yet, though he knew they would find it, and rip it into shreds. He considered falling in love." And in “The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness,” a woman explores a fierce intimacy with her family’s land in West Texas. At only 189 pages, this is a book best read by headlamp under a brightly lit, starkly beautiful, unsentimental night sky.

Bass's novel about oil exploration in Montana — the search for ancient seas buried beneath the mountains. Dense, geological, and animated by the tension between extraction and preservation.