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I am a son of the contemporary American West—born near the Pacific Coast, raised in Texas, and an inveterate traveler of its byways and odd corners. Through the duality of my upbringing, as the son of a well-traveled mother, a suburban sportswriter stepfather, and a father who worked in extractive industries, I’ve seen up close both harmony and dissonance. The work I’m drawn to, whether on the creation end or the consumptive end, goes deep into the lives that play out in these places.
Allen Morris Jones writes with such grace, humility, and empathy that I just knew, from the earliest paragraphs, that I’d follow him wherever he wanted to go with this one.
I like stories, whether on the page, on film, or in the oral tradition, in which the answers aren’t easy, and Jones obliges. This story of a hardscrabble Montana poet who witnessed something horrible as a child and searches for a way to live with it as an adult moved me in a deep and still way.
It’s one of those books I finished, set quietly down, and thought about for days afterward. The thinking about it persists years later.
Eli Singer, a rancher and poet in remote Eastern Montana, sees his life upended when a long-buried corpsewhich turns out to be a murder victim from Eli's childhooderodes out of a hillside on his property. This discovery forces Eli to turn inward to revisit the tragic events in his past that led to a life-changing moment of violence, while at the same time he must reach outside himself toward Chloe, a literary agent from New York whom he is falling in love with. In the tradition of such classic western writers as Thomas McGuane, James Lee Burke, Ivan Doig and…
I am a son of the contemporary American West—born near the Pacific Coast, raised in Texas, and an inveterate traveler of its byways and odd corners. Through the duality of my upbringing, as the son of a well-traveled mother, a suburban sportswriter stepfather, and a father who worked in extractive industries, I’ve seen up close both harmony and dissonance. The work I’m drawn to, whether on the creation end or the consumptive end, goes deep into the lives that play out in these places.
I think it’s easy to live on the fault lines of conflict in the West today and be judgmental about who’s right and who’s wrong. What I love about Elise Atchison’s debut novel is that she avoids those binaries and instead tells the story of a changing Western town through the lens of the land, which bears the transformations—for good or for ill—but also has its own say.
I think Atchison smartly, instinctively employs an excellent piece of writing advice: A good antagonist thinks he/she is the protagonist.
I am a son of the contemporary American West—born near the Pacific Coast, raised in Texas, and an inveterate traveler of its byways and odd corners. Through the duality of my upbringing, as the son of a well-traveled mother, a suburban sportswriter stepfather, and a father who worked in extractive industries, I’ve seen up close both harmony and dissonance. The work I’m drawn to, whether on the creation end or the consumptive end, goes deep into the lives that play out in these places.
Here, I veer off into nonfiction, but only because nobody would believe any novelist who conjured up the likes of the real-life people Betsy Gaines Quammen talks to in constructing this portrait of how things got so fraught out West.
In my view, it takes a writer of particular skill and empathy to honestly get at the thoughts and motivations of folks with whom she likely disagrees on fundamental questions. Further, it takes a writer of inherent fairness to call balls and strikes on all sides of contentious issues. Quammen, for my money, is such a writer.
“True West disentangles reality from centuries of myth and mystique."
—HAMPTON SIDES, New York Times bestselling author of Blood and Thunder
From the Northern Rockies to the Southwest deserts, Betsy Gaines Quammen explores how myths shape our identities, heighten polarizations, and fracture our shared understanding of the world around us. As she investigates the origins and effects of myths of the American West, Gaines Quammen travels through small towns and big cities, engaging people and building relationships at every stop. Misperceptions about land, politics, liberty, and self-determination threaten the well-being of people and communities across the country, and Gaines Quammen…
I am a son of the contemporary American West—born near the Pacific Coast, raised in Texas, and an inveterate traveler of its byways and odd corners. Through the duality of my upbringing, as the son of a well-traveled mother, a suburban sportswriter stepfather, and a father who worked in extractive industries, I’ve seen up close both harmony and dissonance. The work I’m drawn to, whether on the creation end or the consumptive end, goes deep into the lives that play out in these places.
I was utterly awed by Kase Johnstun’s boundless love for the characters in this novel, which I learned later was informed by memories of and letters by his grandparents.
It overflows with some of my favorite things about the literature that most often resonates with me: When an author of great skill can mine memory and history, spend time with it, apply the transformative agent of imagination, and emerge into the world with work laden with genuineness.
I find Johnstun’s work to be imbued with love, which he marries to considerable storytelling chops. He’s a writer more people should know about, so it’s become a bit of a mission of mine to shout his name.
"Beautiful and expansive…in Johnstun's Let the Wild Grasses Grow, Colorado has a successor to Kent Haruf." —SEAN PRENTISS, author of Finding Abbey
Let the Wild Grasses Grow chronicles the lives of Della Chavez and John Cordova, childhood friends separated by a tragic accident, who find each other again during World War II after leading separate lives of struggle through the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, and, for John, abuse at the hands of his grandfather. This sweeping American love story celebrates the power of home landscapes, family heritage, and first love.
I spent most of my life in the western United States. Born and raised in northern Idaho, a professorial position attracted me to Tucson, Arizona, the long-time home of Edward Abbey. Cactus Ed said it best: “The idea of wilderness needs no defense. It only needs more defenders. Remaining silent about the destruction of nature is an endorsement of that destruction.” Upon reading books by Abbey and others writing about the American West, I became a defender of the idea of wilderness.
Guthie’s autobiography describes the wild, western United States from his perspective as a 64-year-old westerner. Born in 1901, Guthrie provides a compelling account of the rugged beauty of the West. Guthrie’s writing is lucid and compelling. I had read most of his books by the time I turned 30.
"It was a fine country to grow up in. To find riches, a boy had only to go outside," writes A. B. Guthrie, Jr., aobut his childhood in Montana early in the twentieth century. This autobiography was originally published in 1965 when he was sixty-four and still had miles to go. It recounts lively adventures and reflects on a career that brought fame for The Big Sky (1947) and led to the Pulitzer Prize for The Way West (1949).
In an afterword David Petersen, who edited Big Sky, Fair Land: The Environmental Essays of A. B. Guthrie, Jr. (1988), describes…
As a college instructor and a student of Western American Literature for many, many years I have read a great number of western novels for my classes and for my literary studies. In addition to my doctoral dissertation on the topic, I have written and published numerous articles and reviews on western writers, and I have given many public presentations as well. I have a long-standing interest in what makes good works good. As a fiction writer, I have published more than thirty traditional western novels with major publishers, and have won several national awards for my western novels and short stories.
The Big Sky is a masterpiece of historical fiction and an often-cited classic novel of the American West. It earns this distinction because of its original characterization, its use of historical and geographical accuracy, its thematic depth, and its symbolism. It is set in the mountain man or fur trade era, and it shows the consequences of White men going into the wilderness. This book introduces the idea, in cultural and environmental terms, that in the occupation of the American West, people ruin the thing they love. This book not only makes it to the top of the lists by western writers, but it also is well appreciated by scholars and students in Western American Literature.
I am a history-phobe turned history fanatic thanks to a snippet of a family story about my great-grandmother. Casual interest morphed into a focused passion when I learned that she truly had homesteaded-- all by herself and in her late teens-- in eastern Montana in 1917. Her accomplishment inspired four years of research and writing, resulting in my first historical novel, Hattie Big Sky, which earned a Newbery Honor award and spent weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. More importantly, that bit of family lore revealed my purpose as a writer and I have since devoted my career to bringing the past alive for today’s young readers.
Evocative and clear-eyed introduction to the western landscape; this compelling read orients readers firmly in place and time. It’s carefully researched nonfiction that reads like a suspense thriller; you’ll spend many nights reading it past your bedtime.
A New York Times Editors' Choice for Book of the Year Winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award Winner of the PEN West Creative Nonfiction Award
"No one has evoked with greater power the marriage of land and sky that gives this country both its beauty and its terror. " --Washington Post Book World
In 1909 maps still identified eastern Montana as the Great American Desert. But in that year Congress, lobbied heavily by railroad companies, offered 320-acre tracts of land to anyone bold or foolish enough to stake a claim to them. Drawn by shamelessly inventive brochures, countless homesteaders--many…
As an immigrant, an Asian American, and a gender-questioning person, I’ve never fit comfortably anywhere. So perhaps it’s no surprise that my writing isn’t easily categorizable either: many have told me that my work is too literary to be considered SF/F and too SF/F to be strictly literary. But what is genre anyway? My favorite books have always been the ones that straddled genres, and every time I read a wonderful book that can’t be easily labeled or marketed, I grow even more sure that the future of literature lies in fluid, boundary-crossing, transgressive texts. Here are some of my favorites—I hope you enjoy them.
I first learned about “proving up” from the eponymous Karen Russell story.
The history of the practice was so fascinating that, when I heard Victor LaValle had written an entire novel about it, I immediately preordered. And wow did it not disappoint.
Part horror and part Western, the story centers a Black woman named Adelaide in the early 1900s who has moved to Montana to prove up as a “lone woman,” carrying with her only a single steamer trunk bearing her “curse.”
LaValle ratchets up the suspense in every chapter while beautifully capturing the desolation of life in the Wild West.
Blue skies, empty land—and enough wide-open space to hide a horrifying secret. A woman with a past, a mysterious trunk, a town on the edge of nowhere, and an “absorbing, powerful” (BuzzFeed) new vision of the American West, from the award-winning author of The Changeling.
“Propulsive . . . LaValle combines chills with deep insights into our country’s divides.”—Los Angeles Times
ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2023: The New York Times, Time, Oprah Daily, Los Angeles Times, Esquire, Essence, Salon, Vulture, Reader’s Digest, The Root, LitHub, Paste, PopSugar, Chicago Review of Books, BookPage, Book Riot, Tordotcom, Crime Reads,…
I am a history-phobe turned history fanatic thanks to a snippet of a family story about my great-grandmother. Casual interest morphed into a focused passion when I learned that she truly had homesteaded-- all by herself and in her late teens-- in eastern Montana in 1917. Her accomplishment inspired four years of research and writing, resulting in my first historical novel, Hattie Big Sky, which earned a Newbery Honor award and spent weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. More importantly, that bit of family lore revealed my purpose as a writer and I have since devoted my career to bringing the past alive for today’s young readers.
Dorothy M. Johnson wrote three short stories that were made into Western movies: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance; The Hanging Tree; and A Man Called Horse. But this collection is a light-hearted visit to her childhood, growing up near Glacier National Park. A quick but delightful read to balance out some of the chewier reading I’ve suggested.
"[When You and I Were Young, Whitefish is] a lighthearted look into the life of a growing Western town in the early twentieth century. These fresh, jaunty tales of youth radiate good humor." -American West
Raised in the American West, I have watched the explosive growth in Colorado with dismay. In my lifetime, metro Denver has grown from a population of about 500,000 people to more than 5.5 million. The Colorado of large ranches and wide, open spaces is disappearing. I have named my publishing company “lost ranch books,” in honor of the ranch where I grew up, which was sold and developed with cookie-cutter houses. I’ve now set out to recapture historic Colorado by writing about it. My award-winning books center on Colorado’s and the American West’s history, for not only is it fascinating and, often, troubling, but it still resonates today.
Punke’s book chronicles a story of heroism and company greed that isn’t that far in the past of America’s labor battles. It tells of a fire that spread through the underground tunnels of the copper mines belonging to J.D. Rockefeller’s Anaconda company and others. The book centers on the men trapped underground who exhaust every possible option in a dire bid to survive, including some ingenious methods and some which hasten their demise. Punke touches as well on political, labor, and business wranglings that put the workers at risk. He also follows Butte’s history to present day, demonstrating that the Montana city has never quite recovered from its past as a copper city.
The author of the #1 New York Times bestseller, The Revenant -- basis for the award-winning motion picture starring Leonardo DiCaprio -- tells the remarkable story of the worst hard-rock mining disaster in American history.
A half-hour before midnight on June 8, 1917, a fire broke out in the North Butte Mining Company's Granite Mountain shaft. Sparked more than two thousand feet below ground, the fire spewed flames, smoke, and poisonous gas through a labyrinth of underground tunnels. Within an hour, more than four hundred men would be locked in a battle to survive. Within three days, one hundred and…
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