I always panic when asked to state my favorite anything. First of all, I’m fickle. No matter what the subject—favorite ice cream flavor, favorite city, favorite color—I will take far too long to decide on a winner, and then change my mind repeatedly within minutes. I can never choose an entrée off a menu in a timely manner, either. Seriously: Eating out gives me severe anxiety, especially if people are watching me order. Inevitably, I suffer food envy. That is the bad thing about choice. I’m almost always sure to make the wrong one.

Picking a favorite writer or novel or story is even more dangerous. It seems that people use such information to make sweeping judgments about who you are, a tidy way to safely categorize or dismiss you. Why else would we scour potential lovers’ and friends’ bookshelves and CD racks if we didn’t want information pertinent to making our decision about the quality of the person in question? I still remember my great heartbreak in college when, desperate to make friends 2000 miles from home, I hit it off with my blonde, bubbly neighbor. Then the Debbie Gibson CD fell out of her car as she unloaded her things. And that was that.

So it is a great testament to Rick Bass’ awesome talent that when asked to choose and discuss my favorite story, I thought of “The History of Rodney” in seconds and had no qualms swearing allegiance to my choice. First of all, it walks the margins of reality but still manages to hit harder and with less guile than most in-your-face realistic stories, and that accomplishment thrills me as a reader. Secondly, it takes place in Mississippi, and I’ve quit pretending that I don’t prefer Southern fiction, more often than not, to all other fiction. And this isn’t your ordinary Mississippi (not that, from my experience, there is anything ordinary about Mississippi), but rather a place almost excused from time, where threatening swine rumored to be descendants of Union soldiers rule a tiny enclave of twelve. A place where indistinguishable days are spent sweating on sun porches while fantasizing about the beauty of the Mississippi River, which up and changed course years before, abandoning the town of Rodney and moving seven miles over. These seven miles might as well be a continent, and the narrator and his wife speak of the river as a mythical thing.

“When a series starts off as excitingly as John Twelve Hawks’s Fourth Realm Trilogy did, readers are apt to cut the author’s next installments a little slack. After all, once an imaginary world springs full-blown from a writer, follow-up fatigue is to be expected. It’s natural to find an author ensnared by his own fanciful creations. Having leapt so high in the first place, the writer is left facing a steep climb.”