The definitive collection of a great American writer's stories. Published in the UK for the first time Rick Bass is unsurpassed in his ability to perceive and portray the enduring truths of the human heart. Collected here for the first time is the definitive volume of his stories, selected from thirty years of work, which will confirm his reputation as one of the most astonishing American writers today. To read his fiction is to feel more alive, and to be captivated by his expression of the vastness of human experience and the awesome beauty of the natural world. The men and women in these stories live with intensity and tenderness, struggling against their fate at the moment of recognition. Rick Bass's sentences resonate with lush and exquisite language and his writing can both shock and astonish. The 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 uplift. Rick Bass, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist for his memoir Why I Came West, was born and raised in Texas, worked as a petroleum geologist in Mississippi, and has lived in Montana's Yaak Valley for almost thirty years. His short fiction, which has appeared on the New Yorker, The Atlantic, Esquire, GQ and the Paris Review, as well as numerous times in The Best American Short Stories, has earned him multiple O. Henry Awards and Pushcart Prizes in addition to NEA and Guggenheim fellowships. He is the writer in residence at Montana State University.