Storytelling has mysterious, unmeasurable power and storytellers have expended a lot of that power trying to explain it to us. Let me try. Hearing a story is a way of organizing the brain and stimulating thought. Formulating a story is an exercise in ordering thought, making associations and generally “thinking…

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Reading William Faulkner’s The Bear on a five-day backpacking trip into the Montana high country reveals what we fear, what we love and what we’ve lost of wild country.

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The Rabbit is fresh back from four days wandering through the Black Canyon of the Yellowstone in northern Yellowstone National Park. Trips like these present unforgettable images and along the way everything turns to metaphor. The path, the descent, the climb—though there were no real mountains involved, just a short…

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The answer to why a decade separates Thomas McGuane’s last two novels is as complicated as one of the charming scoundrels who populate his eight previous works. Rumor had it that the writer, rancher and former movie director had grown tired of the publishing business.

“That was part of it,” McGuane…

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