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...