The Secret Goldfish
by David Means | 
A Relative Stranger
by Charles Baxter | 
Homesick for Another World
by Ottessa Moshfegh | 
Friday Black
by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah | 
Family Furnishings
by Alice Munro | 
Blueprints for Building Better Girls
by Elissa Schappell | 
A Permanent Member of the Family
by Russell Banks | 
Great Dream of Heaven
by Sam Shepard | 
Collected Stories of Reynolds Price
by Reynolds Price | 
A Manual for Cleaning Women
by Lucia Berlin | 
The Fahrenheit Twins
by Michel Faber | 
The UnAmericans
by Molly Antopol | 
The Secrets of a Fire King
by Kim Edwards | 
Dancing After Hours
by Andre Dubus | 
The Color Master
by Aimee Bender | 
The Lives of Rocks
by Rick Bass | 
Sixty Stories
by Donald Barthelme | 
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
by David Foster Wallace | 
An Actor's Life
by Duncan Whitehead | 
Selected Stories
by Alice Munro |
The Hermit's Story is Rick Bass's best and most varied fiction yet. In the title story, a man and a woman travel across an eerily frozen lake - under the ice. "The Distance" casts a skeptical eye on Thomas Jefferson through the lens of a Montana man's visit to Monticello. "Eating" begins with an owl being sucked into a canoe and ends with a man eating a town out of house and home, and "The Cave" is a stunning story of a man and woman lost in an abandoned mine. Other stories include "The Fireman," "Swans," "The Prisoners," "Presidents' Day," "Real Town," and "Two Deer." Some of these stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, but for many readers, they won't even be the best in this collection. Every story in this book is remarkable in its own way, sure to please both new readers and avid fans of Rick Bass's passionate, unmistakable voice.