Where the Sea Used to Be

Houghton Mifflin, 1998. First Edition. Hardcover. Very Good/Very Good. 9x6x1. Some areas of light staining to top edge. The first full-length novel by one of our finest fiction writers, Where the Sea Used to Be tells the story of a struggle between a father and his daughter for the souls of two men, Matthew and Wallis-his proteges, her lovers. Old Dudley is a Texan whose religion is oil, and in his fifty years of searching for it in Swan Valley he has destroyed a dozen geologists. Matthew is Dudley's most recent victim, but Wallis begins to uncover the dark mystery of Dudley's life. Each character, the wildlife, and the land itself are rendered with the vivid poetry that is that hallmark of Rick Bass's writing. Bass won The Story Prize for books published in 2016 for his collection of new and selected stories, For a Little While. He won the 1995 James Jones Literary Society First Novel Fellowship for his novel in progress, Where the Sea Used to Be. He was a finalist for the Story Prize in 2006 for his short story collection The Lives of Rocks. He was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award (autobiography) for Why I Came West (2009). He was also awarded the General Electric Younger Writers Award, a PEN/Nelson Algren Award Special Citation for fiction, and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship.