From stories about cattlemen, fellow critics, his beloved desert, cities, and technocrats to thoughts on sin and redemption, this is one of our most treasured writers at the height of his powers in One Life at a Time, Please.

Edward Abbey died in 1989—too soon, some said. "And where have the years gone?" Abbey wrote, "why, into the usual vices of the romantic realist: into sloth and melancholy, love and marriage and the begetting of children, into the strenuous maneuvers of earning a living without living to earn, into travel and play and music and drink and talk and laughter, into saving the world—but saving the world was only a hobby. Into watching cloud formations float across our planetary skies. But mostly into sloth and melancholy. And I don't regret a moment of it."