SOURCE: Review of The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness, by Rick Bass. Publishers Weekly 244, no. 38 (15 September 1997): 48.

In the following review of The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness, the critic applauds Bass's graceful prose and the mythological quality of his stories.

“Spirit world, my butt,” thinks one hard-bitten character in the first of these three splendid novellas, but it is exactly that—a spirit world—that Bass grasps in his tales of people in the Western wilderness [in The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness]. In the first, a mentally ailing trapper goes after a troublesome quarry: his wife. In the second, a wildcat oil man, who has never once picked a dry well, finds his rewards not in the money or in his perfect record but in his own enchantment with the land. In the title piece, the longest and most powerful of the three, a 44-year-old woman returns...