Short Stories

Dermott Somers's collection of mountaineering stories from Ireland and the Alps. Somers writes with a literary intensity unusual in climbing literature — the prose is as demanding as the routes.

Two of Lopez's slimmest, most mysterious books, published together. Prose poems disguised as field notes, or field notes elevated to prose poetry. The desert and river landscapes are real but also interior — Lopez writing at his most compressed and luminous.

Barry Lopez's collection of short fictions — each one a precise, mysterious vignette about landscape and the human figures who pass through it. Not nature writing. Not fiction exactly. Something in between that only Lopez could have made.

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.

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

London's Yukon stories — gold rush desperation, Arctic cold, and the brutal Darwinism of the frontier. The raw material that became The Call of the Wild.

Short stories set in the Montana wilderness — wolves, bears, and the people who live among them. Bass's fiction has the same intensity as his nonfiction, and the landscape is always a character.

Bass's short stories about geology, landscape, and the people shaped by the land they live on. The rocks are literal — Montana's geology — and metaphorical. The writing is dense and luminous.

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 short stories — Montana, Texas, the landscapes where wildness and domestication collide. The fiction is leaner than the nonfiction, and the sentences are some of his best.

Two winters back, over a lunch of dried caribou along the Arctic’s Noatak River, Alaskan writer Seth Kantner told me I had to read Sherry Simpson’s The Way Winter Comes. First published a decade ago and awarded the Chinook Literary Prize, this little-known collection of essays immerses readers in short scenes of northern wilderness, animals, and people. Juneau-born Simpson’s journalistic accounts of everyday Alaska—“I ride behind a North Pole trapper named Phil on his Tabasco-red snowmachine”—intertwine with graceful lyricism—“In winter the flat, frozen surface of the upper Chena River becomes a boulevard for wildlife, where tracks inscribe a calligraphy of motion in the snow. Everything is going somewhere.” Seth was right. If this book had a spirit animal, it would be the wolverine: small in stature and surprisingly badass. Get the original hardcover if you can, or wait for the forthcoming version from Shorefast Editions.

Lopez's short fiction — spare, mysterious stories set in landscapes where the natural world presses against the human. Each story is a small window into a larger wilderness.