Written with clarity, tenacity, humor, and warmth, A Hundred Little Pieces on the End of the World attempts to find tolerable ethical positions in the face of barely tolerable events-and the real possibility of an intolerable future. It is a compelling, surprising, disturbing, and highly literate work of reportage and contemplation. It is both a collection of gentle-spirited wisdom and a rumination on ruin, as if distilled in equal measure from the spirits of Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It and Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Through these ten essays, each further broken into ten smaller pieces, Rember examines the practical and ethical dilemmas of climate change, population, resource depletion, and mass extinction. At the same time, he never forgets those improbable connections between human beings that lead to moments of joy, empathy, and grace.

By exploring the relationship between the writer and love, grief, place, family, race and violence, John Rember helps you see how to go deep in your writing. He also tells you what you'll find there and how to get back. Along the way, you'll learn how to see the world as a writer sees it."If you have real talent," says Rember, "and choose to go it alone without learning from all of the thousands of writers who have gone before you, for a long time you're going to write like Grandma Moses paints." MFA in a Box will help you take language from translucency to transparency, and make your readers feel like you've written for them alone.

In 1987, John Rember returned home to Sawtooth Valley, where he had been brought up. He returned out of a homing instinct: the same forty acres that had sustained his family's horses had sustained a vision of a place where he belonged in the world, a life where he could get up in the morning, step out the door, and catch dinner from the Salmon River. But to his surprise, he found that what was once familiar was now unfamiliar. Everything might have looked the same to the horses that spring, but to Rember this was no longer home.
In Traplines, Rember recounts his experiences of growing up in a time when the fish were wild in the rivers, horses were brought into the valley each spring from their winter pasture, and electric light still seemed magical. Today those same experiences no longer seem to possess the authenticity they once did. In his journey home, Rember discovers how the West, both as a place in which to live and as a terrain of the imagination, has been transformed. And he wonders whether his recollections of what once was prevent him from understanding his past and appreciating what he found when he returned home. In Traplines, Rember excavates the hidden desires that color memory and shows us how, once revealed, they can allow us to understand anew the stories we tell ourselves.

"From the Hardcover edition.