SOURCE: Seaman, Donna. Review of The Hermit's Story, by Rick Bass. Booklist 98, no. 17 (1 May 2001): 1443.

In the following review, Seaman comments that the stories in The Hermit's Story are among the best Bass has written.

Bass, a passionate, versatile, and increasingly lauded author acutely attuned to the wild and our conflicted relationship with nature, is especially gifted as a short story writer. His newest collection [The Hermit's Story,] is his most pristine, tender, and transporting yet. Bass uses simple, solid language, building sentences that preserve breathing space around each word like a stacked stonewall reveals the contours of each stone. Beautiful in their magical imagery, dramatic in their situations, and exquisitely poignant in their insights, these stories of awe and loss are quite astonishing in their mythic use of place and the elements of earth, air, fire, and water. In “Swans,” a woman lights fires along the shore of...