Rick Bass Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Collections

Publication Order of Selected Shorts Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

Rick Bass is a published American author.

Rick Bass was born in 1958 in Fort Worth, Texas, and grew up in Houston. He is the son of a geologist. He attended Utah State University where he studied petroleum geology. While working as a petroleum geologist in Jackson, Mississippi, he started writing short stories on his lunch breaks.

In 1987, he moved in with his wife Elizabeth Hughes Bass, an artist, to Montana’s remote Yaak Valley. There he became an active environmentalist, working hard to try and protect his newly adopted home from the destructive encroachment of roads and logging.

Bass serves on the board of the Yaak Valley Forest Council and the Round River Conservation Studies. He continues to live with his family on their ranch in Montana, actively engaging and doing his part to save the American wilderness.

Bass received the PEN/Nelson Algren Award in 1988 for his first short story, “The Watch”. He would also win a James Jones Fellowship Award for his novel Where the Sea Used to Be. His novel The Hermit’s Story was picked in 2000 as a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year.

The Lives of Rocks was a finalist for the Story Prize and was selected as a Best Book of the Year in 2006 by the Rocky Mountain News. Bass’s stories have also been awarded the O. Henry Award and the Pushcart Prize and have been collected in The Best American Short Stories.

The Diezmo is a 2005 novel from Rick Bass that author Kent Haruf called ‘vivid, graphic, harrowing’ and the Los Angeles Times called both ‘terrific’ and ‘powerful’. The novel of young men seeking glory in the Republic of Texas has been called by The Oregonian as a ‘surprisingly absorbing rendition of a terrible episode in American history’.

The Diezmo tells the incredible story of the Mier Expedition, one of the most absurd and tragic military adventures in the history of Texas. It is a country and a state, as Rick Bass writes, that was born in blood.

In the early days of the Republic of Texas, two young men who are pursuing glory impulsively volunteer for an expedition Sam Houston has ordered to patrol the Mexican border. But their dreams of triumph quickly fade into their prayers for survival, and all that is on their minds is getting home and having a cool drink of water.

After being captured in a raid on the Mexican village of Mier, escaping, and being recaptured, the men of the expedition are punished with the diezmo. This is a horrible practice in which one men in ten is randomly chosen to die.

The survivors end up in the most dreaded prison in Mexico. There they become pawns in an international chess game to decide the fate of Texas, and with their hopes of release close to extinguished, they make one desperate, last-ditch effort to escape. What will happen? Get a copy for yourself to find out and read the book that author Howard Frank Mosher is calling “The best literary adventure story I’ve read since Legends of the Fall”.

Nashville Chrome is a 2010 novel from author Rick Bass. Read the book that The Los Angeles Times says sees the author create ‘a slice of music history from the ground up, from the backwoods and front porches all the way to Elvis’.

The year is 1959, and the Brown siblings are the largest thing in country music. Their harmony will give rise to the polished sound of the multi-billion dollar country music industry we know today.

But when the bonds of family begin to fray, the flame of their celebrity proves as brilliant as it is fleeting. In this arresting novel, author Rick Bass draws poignant portraits of all of the characters’ lives, lived both in and out of the limelight.

Masterfully jumping between the Browns’ once auspicious past and the heartbreaking present, Nashville Chrome is the richly imagined story of this forgotten family and an unflinching portrait of an era in American music.

Get a copy for yourself and read the book that Kansas City Star is calling ‘breath-catching’ and Dallas Morning News is calling the author’s best.