The Yaak Valley of northwestern Montana is one of the last great wild places in the United States, a land of black bears and grizzlies, wolves and coyotes, bald and golden eagles, wolverine, lynx, marten, fisher, elk, and even a handful of humans. It is a land of magic, but its magic may not be enough to save it from the forces threatening it now. The Yaak does have one trick up its sleeve, though: a writer to give it voice. In Winter Rick Bass portrayed the wonder of living in the valley. In The Book of Yaak he captures the soul of the valley itself, and he shows how, if places like the Yaak are lost, we too are lost. Rick Bass has never been a writer to hold back, but The Book of Yaak is his most passionate book yet, a dramatic narrative of a man fighting to defend the place he loves.

Describes winter in a remote valley of inhabitants, the last valley in Montana without electricity.

Rick Bass's dog Colter is the brown dog of the Yaak who charges through the mountain valleys following the scent of game. Bass gives a history of his years with Colter as a way of understanding what is intuitive in his quest to create art.

The author discusses the attraction he feels to the landscape of the Yaak Valley in extreme, northwest Montana where he has lived for twenty-one years, and meditates on what drew him to the place, the challenges he faced moving and adjusting to life in a climate very different than he had known before, and how the place has changed him.

Long considered one of the most gifted practitioners of the short story, Rick Bass is unsurpassed in his ability to perceive and portray the enduring truths of the human heart. Now, at last, we have the definitive collection of stories, new and old, from the writer Newsweek has called "an American classic." To read his fiction is to feel more alive -- connected, incandescently, to "the brief longshot of having been chosen for the human experience," as one of his characters puts it. These pages reveal men and women living with passion and tenderness at the outer limits of the senses, each attempting to triumph against fate. Bass provides searing insights into the complexity of family and romantic entanglements, and his lush and striking language draws us ineluctably into the lives of these engaging people and their vivid surroundings. The intricate stories collected in For A Little While -- brimming with magic and wonder, filled with hard-won empathy, marbled throughout with astonishing imagery -- have the power both to devastate and to uplift. Together they showcase an iconic American master at his peak.

On long weekends, Rick Bass drives away from Jackson, Mississippi, and the job that confines him. His excursions take him to southern rivers, southern swamps, and sometimes to conservation meetings. Through thirteen essays written in a style compared to Thoreau, Muir, and Annie Dillard, Bass records his meanderings in a lyrical exploration of wildness and freedomin nature and in ourselves. Illus.

The author shares his memories of his favorite dog, Colter, and the diverse ways in which he transformed the author's life, in a look at the dynamic relationship between humans and dogs.