Shakespeare & Co. is delighted to host a reading and discussion with Anna Boorstin on Monday, November 10, at 6:00 pm. Boorstin will read from her debut novel No Place Like (Unsolicited Press, 2025). This event is free and open to the public.

About No Place Like:
No Place Like introduces readers to Lexie Brooker, a retired, 70-something, no-nonsense grandmother who believes she’s losing her mind—until she discovers she’s actually slipped into another universe. Her adult children are concerned, her boyfriend is frustrated, and only her dog remains impartial. 

What follows is a multiverse tale that is equal parts mystery, love story, and meditation on identity. As Lexie navigates alternate versions of her life, she must decide what she’s willing to sacrifice for a chance at something “better.” At its heart, No Place Like is a story of second chances, late-life reinvention, and the profound courage it takes to claim your own story at any age.

Author Biography:
Anna Boorstin cut sound on many classic films of the 1980's, including Real Genius, Clue and Beaches. She raised three sons, each taller than the last, volunteered in several capacities at their schools, and tended to dogs, lizards, hamsters and a sainted cat. Since her nest emptied, she has traveled extensively. Books have been a constant in her life ever since she was old enough to check out ten at a time from her local library.

Shakespeare & Co. is delighted to host a reading and discussion with Emily Meg Weinstein on Wednesday, November 5, 2025 at 7:00 pm. Weinstein will read from her debut memoir Turn to Stone (Simon & Schuster, September 2025) and be in conversation with Missoula-based writer Nick Triolo, author of The Way Around (Milkweed Editions, July 2025). This event is free and open to the public.

About Turn to Stone:
Down on the ground, it was hard to connect, hard to attach, hard to untangle, hard to let go. But up here, I understood. Up here, I could make it good.

Broken by an abusive relationship, Emily Meg Weinstein impulsively tries rock climbing on a California road trip, following strangers into the vertical world. Soon, she is consumed by her addiction to the freedom she feels when she’s up on the wall. Holding on to the rocks, she is free from societal constraints and expectations, free from her own sorrows and longings.

Raw and dark, but also funny, Weinstein describes the steep learning curve of becoming a climber, spending weeks at a time sleeping in the back of her Subaru, and a long, dark night stuck on top of a mountain. As she ascends, Weinstein faces her demons, finding power and grace in risk and adventure. Like Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, but in the vertical, or William Finnegan’s Barbarian Days, if lived by a Jewish woman from Long Island, Turn to Stone tells the story of a journey into nature that becomes a crucible of self-discovery.

Against a tapestry of van-dwellers, anarchists, and Jedi-like Stonemasters, Weinstein explores a world where each leap of faith is an existential lesson. From living on the edge, stepping into the unknown, and falling through thin air, Emily learns to forgive her own failures, heal her deepest wounds, and find courage in the face of fear. Throwing herself at walls of stone, she learns what it means to be human. Fitting her body into the rocks’ broken places, she makes herself whole.

About The Way Around:
Growing up in northern California, in a family of high-achieving athletes, Nicholas Triolo was imbued with a particularly acute form of our intensely goal-oriented culture. “Do the reps,” he internalized. “Commit to the work. Grind for your dreams.” Shortly after graduating from college, he embarked on a solo circumnavigation of the globe. And then after returning to the States, he threw himself into ultrarunning, all to combat a deepening discontent.

While traveling around the world, it was in Kathmandu that Triolo first encountered kora, a form of moving prayer in which pilgrims walk in circles around a sacred site or object—a kind of “ritualized remembering” birthed by place. Unable to shake this initial encounter with circumambulation, he sets out here on three such extended walks. First, he completes the sacred thirty-two-mile revolution around Tibet’s Mount Kailash, in search of a cultural counter to Western linearity. Then, following his mother’s diagnosis with breast cancer, he returns home to California and takes part in an annual circuit of Mount Tamalpais, tracing a route made famous by Beat poets Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Allen Ginsberg. And then finally, he meets up with a quirky hydrogeologist in Butte, Montana, and joins his walk around the Berkeley Pit Complex, the largest Superfund site in the country.

At once uncommonly humble and thrillingly transcendent, blurring the boundaries of inner and outer landscapes, The Way Around models what it means to experience a true revolution of heart and home—for the flourishing of all.

Author Biographies:
Emily Meg Weinstein was born in New York and raised in Queens and Long Island. She lives on a houseboat in the San Francisco Bay, roams in her second home, the Free Ford Freestar, and roots for the New York Mets. 

Nicholas Triolo is a writer, filmmaker, photographer, activist, and long-distance trail runner. His writing and images have been featured in Orion, Outside, Terrain.org, and Trail Runner. He has directed two documentary films, “The Crossing” and “Shaped by Fire,” and collaborated with Salomon on a film about touring and training Death Cab for Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard. Triolo’s films have been Official Selections for several international film festivals and featured on influential platforms such as Patagonia’s Dirtbag Diaries, Upworthy, and Outside magazine. Triolo is based in Missoula, Montana, and you can read more about him at nicholastriolo.net.

Shakespeare & Co. is pleased to host the Eve of the Dead poetry readings on Thursday, October 30, at 5:30 pm. The evening will feature readings by local poets Zan Bockes, Maggie Brown, Martha Elizabeth, Sheryl Noethe, and Deb Trowbridge. This event is free and open to the public.

Author Biographies:
Zan Bockes earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Montana. Her fiction, nonfiction and poetry have appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including The Sun, SLAB and Phantasmagoria, with four nominations for a Pushcart Prize. Her first collection of poetry, Caught in Passing, was published in 2013. Another collection, Alibi for Stolen Light, came out in 2018. Her book of short fiction, From Here, is forthcoming in 2026. She thrives in Missoula with two orange cats, supporting them by cleaning houses as Residential Sanitation Specialist.

Maggie Brown was born in Missoula, though she has also lived in California, Nevada, Arkansas, Colorado, Great Britain, and Washington. Her poems, short stories, and movie and book reviews have been published in McCall’s, The Seattle Times, Borrowed Times, CutBank, The Floating Poetry Gallery, Pacific Magazine, and various literary magazines. Two of her plays were produced and performed in regional theaters. At last count she had nine grandchildren and eight great grandchildren.

Martha Elizabeth has been a writer and artist in Missoula for 36 years, since she began her MFA in Creative Writing at UM, with ceramics as her outside area. She has a BA in Drama from University of Virginia and an interdisciplinary MA from University of North Texas. She was in poetry and screenwriting workshops at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and she was part of the 20-plus years of the Colony, the former annual script conference at UM.

Her awards include a Hugo scholarship and a Bertha Morton Fellowship at UM, a Dobie Paisano Fellowship in Texas, a Writers Voice fellowship in Billings, and the final Montana Arts Council First Book Award for her poetry collection, The Return of Pleasure. She has 3 chapbooks, 2 with her marbling faces on the cover. About 50 of her poems and stories have been in journals and anthologies, including The Georgia Review and the New England Review. 

Her marbling faces were in the 2002 International Marblers Gathering Exhibition, and her marbling landscapes were in shows at Les Yeux du Monde Gallery in Charlottesville, VA. She has had many solo shows through the years at various Missoula venues, including Noteworthy Paper and the former Downtown Dance Collective.

She is the widow of the Missoula writer Jim Crumley.

Sheryl Noethe founded the Missoula Writing Collaborative in 1994. She is currently both Artistic Director and writer-in-residence. Sheryl is also the poetry editor for High Desert Journal. She is co-author of the teaching text Poetry Everywhere, now in its third printing. A recipient of a Montana Arts Council Fellowship, she also has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the CutBank Hugo Prize in Poetry, the Emerging Voices Award from New Rivers Press, a McKnight Prize for Literature, and an American Academy of Poetry Award, as well as an honorable mention for the Pushcart Prize. She is a recipient of a 2004 Cultural Achievement Award from the Missoula Cultural Council for her work in Missoula schools. Her poems have appeared in a number of journals, and she has published four collections of poetry: The Descent of Heaven Over the Lake (New Rivers Press, 1984); The Ghost Openings (Grace Court Press, 2000), which won a Northwest Publisher’s Best Book Award; As Is (Lost Horse Press, 2009); and her latest collection, Grey Dog Big Sky (FootHills Publishing, 2013). In 2011 Sheryl became Montana’s fourth Poet Laureate, an honor she held until 2013, and was awarded the Arts Innovation Award for 2022 by the Montana Arts Council.

Deborah Trowbridge hails originally from Massachusetts, and Missoula has been her home since 2005. Her stories can be read in Thin Air Magazine Online, The Ekphrastic Review, American Writers, Common Ground Review and 50-Word Stories. Her work has been archived in the Potato Soup Review and deComp Literary Magazine. She loves to dance and is a proud member and line dance performer with the Missoula Senior Center’s Boot-Scooters led by the intrepid and amazing Marion Yates.

Shakespeare & Co. is delighted to host a reading and discussion with award-winning author River Selby on Monday, October 27, at 7:00 pm. Selby will read from their debut memoir Hotshot: A Life on Fire (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2025) and be in conversation with Amanda Monthei, the host of the Life With Fire Podcast. This event is free and open to the public.

About Hotshot:
From 2000 to 2010, River Selby was a wildland firefighter whose given name was Anastasia. This is a memoir of that time in their life—of Ana, the struggles she encountered, and the constraints of what it means to be female-bodied in a male-dominated industry. An illuminating debut from a fierce new voice, Hotshot is a timely reckoning with both the personal and environmental dangers of wildland firefighting.

By the time they were nineteen, Selby had been homeless, addicted to drugs, and sexually assaulted more than once. In a last-ditch effort to find direction, they applied to be a wildland firefighter. Two years later, they joined an elite class of specially trained wildland firefighters known as hotshots. Over the course of five fire seasons, Selby delves into the world of the people—almost entirely men—who risk their lives to fight and sometimes prevent wildfires. Simultaneously hyper visible and invisible, Selby navigated an odd mix of camaraderie and rampant sexism on the job and, when they challenged it, a violent closing of ranks that excluded them from the work they’d come to love.

Drawing on years of firsthand experience on the frontlines of fire and years of research, Selby examines how the collision of fire suppression policy, colonization, and climate change has led to fire seasons of unprecedented duration and severity. A work of rare intimacy, Hotshot provides new insight into fire, the people who fight it, and the diversity of ecosystems dependent on this elemental force.

Author Biographies:
River Selby is a former hotshot and wildland firefighter, a writer, and a nonbinary person. They hold an MFA in creative writing from Syracuse University; they are currently pursuing their PhD. They were the recipient of the Emerging Writer’s Prize for Fiction from Boulevard Magazine for their story, “How Certain Fires Burn.” Their writing has appeared in the New Ohio Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Vox, and High Country News. They currently live in Tallahassee, Florida.

Amanda Monthei is a writer, former wildland firefighter and host of Life with Fire Podcast. She is currently pursuing an MFA in nonfiction at the University of Montana.

Shakespeare & Co. is delighted to host a reading and discussion with award-winning investigative reporter Emily Baker-White on Thursday, October 16 at 7:00 pm. Baker-White will read from her new book Every Screen on the Planet: The War Over Tiktok (W. W. Norton & Co., September 2025). This event is free and open to the public.

About Every Screen on the Planet:
Every Screen on the Planet is the first major book on one of the most dramatic business stories of our time. Touching on politics, finance, data, and technology, the struggle over TikTok has enormous implications for our information landscape and the technological cold war between the United States and China.

Emily Baker-White’s engrossing narrative charts TikTok’s rise from obscurity into the world’s most valuable startup, led by its ambitious founder, Zhang Yiming—arguably the father of the modern recommendation algorithm. Zhang’s products reshaped the global internet from a place where you searched for information to one where information came to you. TikTok seemed to know its users in an almost spooky way, provoking wonder and delight. People were hooked. “We intend to become ubiquitous,” a new-hire training video said, to put TikTok “on every screen on the planet."

But virtually everything about TikTok’s users—their interests, locations, and even their unspoken desires—was accessible to staff in Beijing. After Baker-White, a Harvard-trained lawyer and investigative reporter, revealed that Chinese engineers could access Americans’ private information, a team of employees used the app to track her location and attempt to expose whistleblowers. This incident triggered an ongoing criminal investigation and escalated the US government’s fight against Chinese tech.

TikTok was the first Chinese app to become a US juggernaut, and lawmakers soon recognized its potential for surveillance and propaganda—and the threat it might pose in the hands of their rivals. Yet even as hawks in Congress gained support to ban the app, the White House was secretly negotiating for unprecedented control over its information stream. In 2025, when President Donald Trump declined to enforce the so-called ban law, TikTok seemed to complete a miraculous corporate escape. It retained its influence, profits, and power, but now operated at the pleasure of two strongmen: China’s Xi Jinping and Trump himself.

Author Biography:
Emily Baker-White is a technology reporter at Forbes, where her TikTok coverage has won awards. A Harvard Law School graduate and former criminal defender, she previously led the Plain View Project, an investigation into police misconduct on Facebook, and covered TikTok for BuzzFeed News. She lives in Philadelphia.

Shakespeare & Co. is delighted to host a reading and discussion with Missoula-based author Gary W. Hawk on Thursday, September 25 at 7:00 pm. Hawk will read from his new book Into This Radiance: Kayaking Flathead Lake (Quercus Publishing, 2025). This event is free and open to the public.

About Into This Radiance:
In Into This Radiance Gary Hawk shares his complex relationship with an immense place—Flathead Lake, the largest US body of freshwater west of the Great Lakes. Hawk has paddled a sea kayak for over nineteen years, and he takes the reader along with him as he explores the lake’s bays, islands, and the distances between them. In the process, he shares his reverence for this inland sea, his keen naturalist’s eye for detail, and his observations, questions, and insights from various wisdom traditions.

Year after year, in many kinds of weather, he encounters, grows to understand, and attends to the lake as though it were a sentient being. But even as he turns his attention outward toward the lake and all who depend on it, he delves into an interior landscape. Here, he invites the reader to stay open to what at first seems strange or threatening.

The book’s short, lyric essays and poetic passages offer encouragement to live wisely and thoughtfully in a fragile and changing world.

Author Biography:
Gary W. Hawk began his higher education at Stanford University and continued his studies at The Pacific School of Religion. After serving two churches in Northern California and one in Helena, Montana, he balanced three careers, teaching for nineteen years in the Davidson Honors College at the University of Montana, practicing the craft of fine woodworking, and listening to people in a counseling office. He also continues to write. Poems and essays have appeared in Camas, Gray’s Sporting Journal, The Christian Century, Connotations, Northern Lights, and Awake in the World, Vol.3. He is the father of two grown sons, Andy and Kyle, and is married to psychologist Joyce L. Hocker. He paddles a sea kayak named Bluebird and, paraphrasing poet Theodore Roethke, ventures out on the wildest wave and tries to be still. Gary lives in Missoula, Montana, writes at www.ospreypaddler.com.

Shakespeare & Co. is delighted to host a reading and discussion with Joanna Sokol on Tuesday, September 23, at 7:00 pm. Sokol will read from her debut memoir A Real Emergency: Stories from the Ambulance (Strange Light, 2025). This event is free and open to the public.

About A Real Emergency:
For fifteen years, Joanna Sokol filled private notebooks with her confusion, humor, and anger toward the strange world of emergency street medicine. As her career on the ambulance progressed, she found herself taking notes on scraps of paper, the backs of gloves, and in the margins of EKG printouts. She listened to her patients’ stories, left food out for their pets, and turned off the stove under their oxtail stews. Once, she read half a poem left in a dead woman’s typewriter. She learned about the history that brought ambulances into their current role as the caretakers of society’s forgotten and spoke to her colleagues about their own experiences and perspectives. 

Those reflections are collected here, in a series of raw, powerful essays about the state of modern healthcare. 

Sokol’s life as a paramedic took her to three different counties: the casinos and trailer parks of the Nevada desert, the cozy beach town of Santa Cruz, and, eventually, the crowded tenements of San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. There are no clear villains or heroes in Sokol’s world, only a group of patients and medics who are doing their best in a deeply broken system.  

Combining impactful research, compassionate reflections on her most memorable patients, and the strong voices of her fellow paramedics, Sokol takes readers deep into the everyday reality of 911 first responders, offering insight, empathy, and a reminder of both the power and limitations of care.

Author Biography:
Joanna Sokol has worked on a 911 ambulance for ten years: along the beach in Santa Cruz, in the high desert of Reno, and on the steep streets of San Francisco. Before that, she spent time as a ski patroller, wilderness EMT, and medical stand by for raves and music festivals. She holds a paramedic license and a Bachelor’s degree in Biological Sciences from the University of California at Santa Cruz. During her time at the San Francisco Fire Department, she received an award for Clinical Excellence and served as a member of the Street Crisis Response team. Her literary work has appeared in Reader’s Digest, Epoca, and Hazlitt, and she received a Sidney Award in 2019. Born and raised in Oakland, California, Sokol currently lives in Santa Cruz with her boyfriend and a very stubborn dog.

Shakespeare & Co. is pleased to host a reading and discussion with celebrated film critic and author Kenneth Turan on Monday, September 22, at 7:00pm. Turan will read from his new book Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg: The Whole Equation (Yale University Press, 2025). This event is free and open to the public.

About Louis B. Mayer & Irving Thalberg: The Whole Equation:
One was a tough junkman’s son, the other a cosseted mama’s boy, but they dreamed the same mighty dream: that the right movies could make a profit and change both the culture and individual lives. Sharing a religion and an evangelical zeal for film, Louis B. Mayer (1884–1957) and Irving Thalberg (1899–1936) were unlikely partners in one of the most significant collaborations in movie history. Over the course of their decade-long relationship, as key players at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and major players in Hollywood, they joined forces in redefining and mastering the template for the film industry.

Mayer, older by more than a dozen years, was the business-minded face of the studio, while Thalberg worked closely with the creative corps, especially writers; together they rarely set a foot wrong. And while Mayer initially viewed Thalberg as the son he never had, the two would go from passionate friends to near enemies before Thalberg’s shocking death at the age of thirty-seven.

In the first joint biography of the two men in fifty years, film critic Kenneth Turan traces their fraught relationship while examining the complicated history of Jewish identity in Hollywood.

Author Biography:
Kenneth Turan was the film critic of the Los Angeles Times for nearly thirty years and was also a film critic for National Public Radio. He is the author of Not to Be Missed: Fifty-Four Favorites from a Lifetime of Film, among other books. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

Shakespeare & Co. is pleased to host a virtual reading and discussion with celebrated author and one-time Missoulian Joanna Pocock on Saturday, September 13, at 10:00am. Pocock will read from her new book Greyhound: A Memoir (Soft Skull, 2025). This event is free and open to the public. Please note the necessary start time of 10:00am for this transatlantic event.

About Greyhound:
Combining history, reportage, and nature writing with intimate moments of reflection, Greyhound tells of the journey from miscarriage to parenthood, and the purpose creativity gives to our lives when we feel purposeless.

In 2006, in the wake of several miscarriages, Joanna Pocock traveled by Greyhound bus across the United States from Detroit to Los Angeles. Seventeen years later, she undertakes the same journey, revisiting the cities, edgelands, highways, and motels in the footsteps of the few women writers—Simone de Beauvoir, Ethel Mannin, and Irma Kurtz—who also chronicled their road trips across the United States. Combining memoir, reportage, environmental writing, and literary criticism, Greyhound is a moving and immersive book that captures an America in the throes of late capitalism with all its beauty, horror, and complexity.

Author Biography:
Joanna Pocock is an Irish Canadian writer living in London. Her writing has notably appeared in the Los Angeles Times and The Nation, and she is a contributor to the Dark Mountain Project. She won the 2018 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize for Surrender, and in 2021 she was awarded the Arts Foundation’s Environmental Writing Award. She was short-listed for the Eccles Centre & Hay Festival Writer’s Award in 2023 for Greyhound.

Shakespeare & Co. is delighted to host a reading and discussion with award-winning author Eric Puchner, in conversation with Mark Sundeen, on Tuesday, August 12 at 7:00 pm. Eric will read from his new novel Dream State (an Oprah Book Club Pick). This event is free and open to the public.

About Dream State:
Cece is in love. She has arrived early at her future in-laws’ lake house in Salish, Montana, to finish planning her wedding to Charlie, a young doctor with a brilliant life ahead of him. Charlie has asked Garrett, his best friend from college, to officiate the ceremony, though Cece can’t imagine anyone more ill-suited for the task—an airport baggage handler haunted by a tragedy from his and Charlie’s shared past. But as Cece spends time with Garrett, his gruff mask slips, and she grows increasingly uncertain about her future. And why does Garrett, after meeting Cece, begin to feel, well, human again? As a contagious stomach flu threatens to scuttle the wedding, and Charlie and Garrett’s friendship is put to the ultimate test, Cece must decide between the life she’s dreamed of and a life she’s never imagined.

The events of that summer have long-lasting repercussions, not only on the three friends caught in its shadow but also on their children, who struggle to escape their parents’ story. Spanning fifty years and set against the backdrop of a rapidly warming Montana, Dream State explores what it means to live with the mistakes of the past—both our own and the ones we’ve inherited. 

Written with humor, precision, and enormous heart, both a love letter and an elegy to the American West, Dream State is a thrillingly ambitious ode to the power of friendship, the weird weather of marriage, and the beauty of impermanence.

Author Biographies:
Eric Puchner is an award-winning, New York Times Notable novelist whose books Model Home, Last Day, and Music Through the Floor have been finalists for prizes including New York Public Library Young Lions Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award in Fiction; his writing has appeared in outlets including GQ, Granta, Tin House, and beyond. With his latest novel, he has reached new creative heights and is poised for a mid-career breakout. For readers of Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House, Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting, and Adam Haslett’s Imagine Me Gone, Dream State similarly interrogates the ways our past choices and mistakes haunt our present lives, following the intertwined fates of three friends over the course of sixty years in the America west.

Mark Sundeen is the author of four other books about the American West: The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today’s America; Car Camping: The Book of Desert Adventures; The Making of Toro: Bullfights, Broken Hearts, and One Author’s Quest for the Acclaim He Deserves; and The Man Who Quit Money, which was a national bestseller and has been translated into six languages. A contributing editor for Outside Magazine, his work has appeared in The New York Times, National Geographic Adventure, The Believer, and Best American Essays. He is an associate professor of environmental studies at the University of Montana.

Shakespeare & Co. is delighted to host a reading and discussion with the celebrated founders of County Highway: America’s Only Newspaper on Saturday, August 9th at 7:00 pm. Walter Kirn, Editor-at-Large, and Amanda Fortini, natural remedies columnist, will give readings and discuss the founding and future of the newspaper. This event is free and open to the public.

About County Highway:
County Highway is a magazine about America in the form of a 19th-century newspaper, started on a shoestring by three friends (David Samuels, Walter Kirn, and Ryan Baesemann) in the wake of the pandemic. We’ve since become the fastest growing print periodical in the country — earning an annual circulation of 150,000 copies barely one year after releasing our debut issue.

The name County Highway is inspired by what we believe is the perfect-sized place for the enhancement of life and art. A county is a chunk of earth big enough to allow for a variety of human types, but small enough to get to know a decent number of your neighbors, where they come from, what they’re proud of, what they fear, what they smoke, what they drink, and what they love. The county where our newspaper is located is somewhere between all those places, real and imaginary. It’s the scale of the place that’s important to us, and also the idea of traveling from one to another with an eye towards finding new answers to the founding American questions of who we are, and why we are here.

Dubbed “America’s Only Newspaper,” we feature hairy off-road adventures by some of America's best and strangest writers; reports on the myriad of political and spiritual crises that are gripping our country and their deeper cultural and historical sources; regular columns about agriculture, civil liberties, animals, herbal medicine, and living off the grid, both mentally and physically; essays about literature and art; and an entire section devoted to music. Offering a road-side banquet of American humor, common-speech, and social and political insights in every issue, we print six times each year for our readers across all fifty states and Canada. Our pages have proven that wherever there’s a stop sign, there’s a story.

Author Biographies:
Walter Kirn is a fiction writer, essayist, critic, and editor-at-large of County Highway. His novels include Up in the Air and Thumbsucker, both of which were made into major feature films. His essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harper's, and countless other publications. His latest book is Blood Will Out, a memoir.

Amanda Fortini is a natural remedies columnist for County Highway. She divides her time between Livingston, Montana, and Las Vegas, Nevada, about which she is currently writing a book of essays, Flamingo Road. From 2021 to 2022, she did a nine-month flower essence apprenticeship and got certified as a practitioner.

Shakespeare & Co. is delighted to host a reading and reception for the release of Saving the Big Sky: A Chronicle of Land Conservation in Montana, on Wednesday, July 23 at 7:00 pm. This event is free and open to the public.

About Saving the Big Sky:
“The essential purpose of Saving the Big Sky is to inspire the reader to help conserve even more of Montana,” write Bruce Bugbee, Robert Kiesling, and John Wright in this compelling study of how six million acres of biodiverse land were conserved in Montana over the past fifty years. Indigenous and non-Indigenous knowledge about land stewardship has evolved and since the 1970s tribes, nonprofit organizations, land trusts, and government agencies have conserved land in many creative ways. Beautifully illustrated with more than ninety color photographs and thirty detailed maps, Saving the Big Sky showcases land conservation achievements across eight regions of the state: the Rocky Mountain Front, the Blackfoot Valley, the Greater Yellowstone, the Missoula Region, the Helena Region, Northwest Montana, the Flathead Indian Reservation, and the American Prairie.

Land protection is shown to work best when large, intact, connected landscapes can be conserved, rather than small, fragmented, isolated parcels. Conservationists have found that landowners in Montana more widely accept conservation easements and other voluntary, financially compensating tools that respect private property rights. The brilliant images and striking before-and-after maps featured here celebrate the ranches, farms, wildlife habitats, and scenic open spaces that are forever safeguarded.

In documenting conservation accomplishments and suggesting what more can be done, Saving the Big Sky invites readers to participate in conserving Montana—or whatever cherished landscape they call home.

Author Biographies:
Bruce A. Bugbee is a land conservation consultant and founder of American Public Land Exchange.

Robert J. Kiesling is a real estate broker, conservation consultant, and former executive director of the Montana Environmental Information Center and the Big Sky (Montana/Wyoming) office of The Nature Conservancy.

John B. Wright has completed over one hundred conservation easements in Montana and the Rocky Mountain West and is professor emeritus of geography and environmental studies at New Mexico State University.

Shakespeare & Co. is delighted to host a reading and discussion with Montana novelist Colleen O’Brien on Friday, June 27 at 6:00 pm. O’Brien will read from her debut novel Baited (Unbridled Books, June 2025). This event is free and open to the public.

About Baited:
It’s 2004, the summer of Glacier Park’s grizzly bear DNA study. In the Cut Bank Valley, Clancy Dyer dashes through the aspen to roust her coworker Ezra. She finds his shredded tent and a horrible smell. Ezra has disappeared. Meanwhile, District Ranger Mack Savage speeds toward the valley’s car campground in response to his rookie ranger’s report of unusual grizzly bear behavior.

Mack has been dating Liz Ralston, the biologist conducting a groundbreaking DNA study. Saboteurs have wrenched her materials and she suspects both park personnel and a local climber. Frustrated with Mack’s inability to protect her study, Liz is hell bent on making the sabotage stop. As they work to find Ezra, Clancy and Mack untangle a knot of misdeeds and discover the cruelty of people desperate for recognition, revenge and belonging. Told from multiple voices representing Glacier’s eclectic east side community, Baited grapples with the clash of emotions surrounding grizzly bears, relationships across social and cultural boundaries, and what it means to behave honorably in an unjust world.

Author Biography:
Colleen O’Brien’s writing was included in the anthologies A Mile in Her Boots: Women Who Work in the Wild, Bright Bones: Contemporary Montana Writing, and A View Inside Glacier National Park: 100 Years, 100 Stories. Her short stories and essays have been published in Montana Quarterly, Flathead Living, The Missoulian, Whitefish Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Weddings, Montana Outdoors, Go Local Flathead Valley, and on Timothy McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. She holds an MFA from the University of Montana and is co-owner of several East Glacier, Montana businesses. She lives with her family near Glacier Park. Baited is her first novel. The manuscript was awarded the Michael Kenneth Smith Fellowship at Porches Writing Retreat in Virginia.

Shakespeare & Co. is delighted to host a reading and discussion with celebrated medical historian Brandy Schillace on Monday, June 23 at 7:00 pm. Brandy will read from her new book The Intermediaries: A Weimar Story (W. W. Norton, May 2025). This event is free and open to the public.

About The Intermediaries:
Set in interwar Germany, The Intermediaries tells the forgotten story of the Institute for Sexual Science, the world’s first center for homosexual and transgender rights. Headed by a gay Jewish man, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, the institute aided in the first gender-affirming surgeries and hormone treatments, acting as a rebellious base of operations in the face of rising prejudice, nationalism, and Nazi propaganda.

An expert in medical history, Brandy Schillace tells the story of the Institute through the eyes of Dora Richter, an Institute patient whom we follow in her quest to transition and live as a woman. While the colorful but ultimately tragic arc of Weimar Berlin is well documented, The Intermediaries is the first book to assert the inseparable, interdependent relationship of sex science to both the queer rights movement and the permissive Weimar culture, tracking how political factions perverted that same science to suit their own ends.

This riveting book brings together forgotten scientific and surgical discoveries (including previously untranslated archival material from Berlin) with the politics and social history that galvanized the first stirrings of the trans rights movement. Through its unforgettable characters and immersive, urgent storytelling, The Intermediaries charts the relationships between nascent sexual science, queer civil rights, and the fight against fascism. It tells riveting stories of LGBTQ pioneers—a surprising, long-suppressed history—and offers a cautionary tale in the face of today’s oppressive anti-trans legislation.

Author Biography:
Brandy Schillace is a historian, former professor and museum professional, and editor of Medical Humanities, a social-justice journal. She writes about gender, medical history, and neurodiversity for outlets including Scientific American, Wired, CrimeReads, and Undark. She lives in Ohio.

Shakespeare & Co. is delighted to host a reading by poet Phil Burgess on Tuesday, June 17 at 7:00 pm. Burgess will read from his new memoir The Bunch Quitter (self-published, June 2025). Missoula musician Bob Wire will open with some of his favorite songs.. This event is free and open to the public.

About The Bunch Quitter:
In his latest book, Burgess recounts his journey from a hardscrabble ranch in Eastern Montana through his tour of Vietnam to going out on the road through a turbulent America. A true raconteur, Burgess’s stories evoke laughter, stir emotions, and leave lasting impressions. In this and other books, Burgess meditates on exile—both chosen and imposed—for he is what’s known in cow country as a bunch quitter: a creature that’s unwilling or unable to be herded, even at great cost. He reminds us that life on the road can liberate and imprison in equal measure.

Growing up, Burgess’s sleep was haunted by the cries of wild geese and the last wails of the Great Northern steam engines echoing across the Missouri River valley. When he went to Vietnam, he says he left behind a family shaped by the scars of war, the Great Depression, mental illness, inadequate healthcare, and reservation violence. After earning a college degree, Burgess received what he calls a “less formal but somewhat more intense education” as an Army officer in Vietnam, where he, as he says, managed to avoid being a hero.

In 1980, Burgess came to rest—geographically, if not spiritually—in the mountains of Western Montana. In 2005 he was nominated for the position of Montana’s first poet laureate. He has since dedicated his life to serving as a veteran’s spokesman and therapist, and to being a poet and a storyteller as he continues to reckon with the road, memory, and meaning.

Author Biography:
In addition to The Bunch Quitter, Philip Burgess has written three books of poetry, Henry’s Cows: Poetry by Philip J. Burgess; Penny Postcards and Prairie Flowers; and Badlands Child. In 2005, Burgess was nominated for the position of Montana’s first poet laureate. He was born in Eastern Montana and served as an officer in Vietnam, and then, after he returned to the US, he took to the road. He made his home in Western Montana, where he dedicates his life to serving as a veteran’s spokesman and therapist, and to being a poet and a storyteller as he continues to reckon with the road, memory, and meaning.

Shakespeare & Co. is pleased to host a reading and reception with local author, Russell Thayer, on Tuesday, May 13 at 6:00 pm. Thayer will read from his first book Bop City Swing (Cowboy Jamboree Press, April 2025), which was co-authored by M.E. Proctor. This event is free and open to the public.

Bop City Swing is a rip-roaring tale of San Francisco in 1951, a crime novel infused with jazz that harkens back to the golden age of noir fiction, with its femmes fatales, fedoras, and shady characters. The story begins with the assassination of a campaigning politician during a fundraiser. Tom Keegan is the Homicide detective on the case. Gunselle was the killer hired to take out the candidate, but somebody beat her to it. Who did it and why? Tom and Gunselle are both eager to crack the case. The trail will lead them down paths of darkness that echo with the memories of war.

Author Biographies:
Russell Thayer’s work has appeared in Brushfire, Tough, Roi Fainéant Press, Guilty Crime Magazine, Mystery Tribune, Close to the Bone, Bristol Noir, Apocalypse Confidential, Cowboy Jamboree Press, Hawaii Pacific Review, Shotgun Honey, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, Rock and a Hard Place Press, Revolution John, Punk Noir, Expat Press, Pulp Modern, The Yard Crime Blog, and Outcast Press. He received his BA in English from the University of Washington, worked for decades at large printing companies, and currently lives in Missoula, Montana. You can find him lurking on “X” @RussellThayer10.

M.E. Proctor (www.shawmystery.com) was born in Brussels and lives in Texas. The first book in her Declan Shaw PI series, Love You Till Tuesday (2024), came out from Shotgun Honey, with the follow up, Catch Me on a Blue Day, scheduled for 2025. She’s also the author of a short story collection, Family and Other Ailments. Her fiction has appeared in Vautrin, Tough, Rock and a Hard Place, Bristol Noir, Mystery Tribune, Shotgun Honey, Reckon Review, and Black Cat Weekly among others. She’s a Derringer nominee.

Shakespeare & Co. is pleased to host a reading by celebrated author and University of Montana associate professor Mark Sundeen, in conversation with Keetje Kuipers, on Thursday, February 27 at 7:00 pm. Sundeen will read from his new book Delusions and Grandeur: Dreamers of the New West (University of New Mexico Press, February 2025). This event is free and open to the public.

About Delusions and Grandeur:
In these new and selected essays, Mark Sundeen recounts two decades of political activism, outdoor exploration, and empathetic curiosity. He was both witness to and active participant in pivotal cultural and political events of the new millennium, from Howard Dean’s presidential campaign to the Iraq War protests and the NoDAPL uprising in Standing Rock. But what brings these large phenomena into humanistic focus is the cast of idiosyncratic people he meets. Using first-person reportage, well-crafted storytelling, and wry, self-deprecating humor, Sundeen’s keen observations illustrate what everyday life is like for people in the contemporary American West, with all their systemic precarities and individual triumphs.

Author Bio:
Mark Sundeen is the author of four other books about the American West: The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today’s America; Car Camping: The Book of Desert Adventures; The Making of Toro: Bullfights, Broken Hearts, and One Author’s Quest for the Acclaim He Deserves; and The Man Who Quit Money, which was a national bestseller and has been translated into six languages. A contributing editor for Outside Magazine, his work has appeared in The New York Times, National Geographic Adventure, The Believer, and Best American Essays. He is an associate professor of environmental studies at the University of Montana.

Shakespeare & Co. is pleased to host a reading by celebrated author Sneed B. Collard III on Tuesday, December 10 at 6:00 pm. Collard will read from his new book Birding for Boomers: And Everyone Else Brave Enough to Embrace the World's Most Rewarding and Frustrating Activity (Mountaineers Books, 2024) and show a slideshow. This event is free and open to the public.

About Birding for Boomers:
A laugh-out-loud funny yet informative introduction to this popular pastime, Birding for Boomers takes novice birders of all ages by the hand and leads them on a journey to discover the joys of birdwatching. Author Sneed B. Collard III covers all the questions a beginner may have, including bird behavior and identification, selecting the right equipment, finding places to birdwatch, and much more. Collard’s guide is for anyone interested in getting started with birdwatching but, inspired by his own experiences, he spotlights older birders who will appreciate his personal insights and tips for overcoming aging-related challenges such as mobility issues, poor hearing, or failing eyesight.

For ease of use, Birding for Boomers is organized according to the progression of skills beginning birders need, and features tips, checklists, and colorful illustrations throughout. Additional sections cover sharing birding with others and contributing to community science, habitat stewardship, and bird conservation. Appealing and light-hearted, Birding for Boomers will help a wide range of readers get started with watching, understanding, and conserving our feathered friends.

Author Bio:
Sneed B. Collard III is the author of almost one hundred books for adults and children, including the award-winning Warblers & Woodpeckers: A Father-Son Big Year of Birding and First-Time Japan: A Step-by-Step Guide for the Independent Traveler. A biologist by training, he writes on a wide variety of bird, science, and travel topics for BWD Magazine, Montana Outdoors, and other magazines. When he is not writing or birding, Sneed can be found speaking to school and birding groups of all ages, traveling with his family, and walking his “birding dog,” Lola.

Shakespeare & Co. is pleased to host the Eve of the Dead poetry readings on Wednesday, October 30, at 5:00 pm. The evening will feature readings by local poets Zan Bockes, Maggie Brown, Martha Crumley, Sheryl Noethe, and Deb Trowbridge. This event is free and open to the public.

Author Bios
Zan Bockes earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Montana. Her work appears in numerous publications, and she has had four Pushcart Prize nominations. Her two poetry collections, Caught in Passing and Alibi for Stolen Light, were published in 2013 and 2018. She lives in Missoula, Montana, where she works as a Residential Sanitation Specialist, cleaning houses.

Maggie Brown was born in Missoula, though she has also lived in California, Nevada, Colorado, Great Britain, and Washington. Her poems, short stories, movie and book reviews have been published in McCall’s, The Seattle Times, Borrowed Times, CutBank, The Floating Poetry Gallery, Pacific Magazine, and various literary magazines. She also had two plays produced and performed in regional theaters.

Deborah Trowbridge grew up dancing in Massachusetts and moved to Western Montana, in 2005, still dancing. She’s been writing with intention since 2010. Her stories can be read in Thin Air Magazine Online, The Ekphrastic Review, American Writers, Common Ground Review and 50-Word Stories.

When famed Bear 399--the Matriarch of the Tetons--took her four cubs on a walkabout around Kevin Grange's neighborhood in Jackson Hole, WY, he felt conflicted about having grizzlies on the landscape and wasn't sure if he was "a bear person." So, he ventured into the wild with biologists, naturalists, conservationists, and guides to learn everything he could about brown bears, see if he could understand them, and answer the important question: how can we coexist?

Please join us on Tuesday, October 29, at 6pm for an evening of grizzly bears and banter at Shakespeare & Co. as Kevin Grange--in partnership with the Vital Ground Foundation--talks about his new book Grizzly Confidential: An Astounding Journey Into the Secret Life of North America's Most Fearsome Predator(Harper Horizon, September 2024) which details his journey from being unsure if he was a bear person to being an advocate of respect for grizzlies and their place in the wild. Kevin will follow up his multimedia presentation--which features professional photos and video from his travels to such places as Kodiak Island, McNeil River State Game Sanctuary, and Yellowstone--with a Q&A, moderated by Matt Hart of Vital Ground. The result will be an entertaining, inspiring and informative evening. 

Author Bio
Kevin Grange is a firefighter paramedic in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. He is the award-winning author of Wild Rescues: A Paramedic's Extreme Adventures in Yosemite, Yellowstone, and Grand Teton, Lights and Sirens: The Education of a Paramedic, and Beneath Blossom Rain: Discovering Bhutan on the Toughest Trek in the World. He has written for National Parks, Backpacker, Utne Reader, Yoga Journal, and the Orange County Register. He has worked as a park ranger and paramedic at Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Grand Teton National Parks.

About the Book
In Grizzly Confidential, author Kevin Grange—former paramedic and park ranger at Yellowstone and Grand Teton—comes face-to-face with North America’s most fearsome predator, Ursus Arctos.

His quest takes him from his home in the Tetons to an eerie, mist-shrouded island of gigantic bruins; from the Bear Center at Washington State University—where scientists believe the secrets of hibernation might help treat diabetes, heart disease, and obesity in humans—to the dark underbelly of for-profit wildlife parks, illegal animal trade and black markets hawking bear bile.

Along the way, he meets fascinating biologists and activists and discovers that everything he knew about grizzlies was wrong. Ultimately, his odyssey leads him to find answers on a remote corner of the Alaskan Peninsula where, for the last fifty years, humans have coexisted peacefully alongside the largest gathering of brown bears on the planet. 

Grizzly Confidential is about bears but also the inspiring people who look after them. This is a fast-paced, gripping story that educates, entertains, and gives a sneak peek into the secret life of a well-known species. Part science, part travelogue, and a passionate plea for bear conservation, Grizzly Confidential is a lively account for anyone who loves the outdoors and learning about the natural world.

Shakespeare & Co. is pleased to host a reading by author and University of Montana Environmental Writing Institute alum Katherine E. Standefer on Monday, October 28, at 7:00 pm. Standefer will read from her debut book Lightning Flowers: My Journey to Uncover the Cost of Saving a Life (Little Brown Spark, 2022). This event is free and open to the public.

Author Bio
Katherine E. Standefer's debut book Lightning Flowers: My Journey to Uncover the Cost of Saving a Life was a Finalist for the Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction, selected as a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice/Staff Pick, and shortlisted for the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Prize from Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Lightning Flowers was also chosen as the Common Read at Colorado College in '22-'23, featured on NPR's Fresh Air, and named one of O, The Oprah Magazine's Best Books of Fall 2020. Standefer earned her MFA in Creative Nonfiction at the University of Arizona. She has been a Logan Nonfiction Fellow at the Carey Institute for Global Good and a Marion Weber Healing Arts Fellow at the Mesa Refuge. Her work was included in The Best American Essays 2016. Standefer regularly gives talks on narrative medicine and the supply chain ethics of medical technology. She lives in Wyoming.

About the Book
What if a lifesaving medical device causes loss of life along its supply chain? That's the question Katherine E. Standefer finds herself asking one night after being suddenly shocked by her implanted cardiac defibrillator.

In this gripping, intimate memoir about health, illness, and the invisible reverberating effects of our medical system, Standefer recounts the astonishing true story of the rare diagnosis that upended her rugged life in the mountains of Wyoming and sent her tumbling into a fraught maze of cardiology units, dramatic surgeries, and slow, painful recoveries. As her life increasingly comes to revolve around the internal defibrillator freshly wired into her heart, she becomes consumed with questions about the supply chain that allows such an ostensibly miraculous device to exist. So she sets out to trace its materials back to their roots.

From the sterile labs of a medical device manufacturer in southern California to the tantalum and tin mines seized by armed groups in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to a nickel and cobalt mine carved out of endemic Madagascar jungle, Lightning Flowers takes us on a global reckoning with the social and environmental costs of a technology that promises to be lifesaving but is, in fact, much more complicated.

Deeply personal and sharply reported, Lightning Flowers takes a hard look at technological mythos, healthcare, and our cultural relationship to medical technology, raising important questions about our obligations to one another, and the cost of saving one life.

Shakespeare & Co. is pleased to host a celebration for the reissue of Norman Macleod’s classic novel The Bitter Roots on Thursday, October 24 at 7:00 pm. Missoula author Gabriella Graceffo, who wrote the afterword, will read from the book and be in conversation with Missoula author and Director of UM Press, Robert Stubblefield. This event is free and open to the public.

The Bitter Roots is more than just a novel—it’s a vivid snapshot of life in Missoula, Montana, from 1917 to 1920, through the eyes of a determined fourteen-year-old boy, Pauly. As he swims in the Clark Fork River one summer day, Pauly witnesses a tragedy that sets the stage for his own struggle to find his identity amidst the tumult of early 20th-century America.

Norman Macleod’s largely autobiographical novel, first published in 1941 and now reissued for the first time, offers an unfiltered portrayal of a nation grappling with the harsh realities of racism, class prejudice, labor disputes, and the impact of World War I. This forgotten classic brings to life the daily challenges faced by a young boy surrounded by violence, strikes, gang fights, and the looming presence of Prohibition.

The Bitter Roots provides a rare, unvarnished glimpse into a young America, where Macleod’s detailed recollections of Missoula capture the essence of a small town on the brink of change. Readers are treated to a literary journey filled with newspaper clippings, songs, movie ads, and patriotic slogans that paint a rich tapestry of the era.

This novel also offers a unique window into the formative years of Norman Maclean, the celebrated author of A River Runs Through It, and his brother Paul, adding another layer of depth to this historical narrative.

Author Bios
Gabriella Graceffo serves as Managing Editor for Poetry Northwest and is a PhD candidate in Interdisciplinary Studies (English and Psychology) at the University of Montana. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Poets & Writers, Gulf Coast, Hippocampus, Autofocus, and others.

Poet and novelist Norman Macleod was born in Salem, Oregon, and earned a BA from the University of New Mexico and an MA from Columbia University. An editor at various magazines and journals, including Pembroke Magazine, Macleod was instrumental in establishing the Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. He taught at numerous institutions, including San Francisco State College, the University of Baghdad in Iraq, and Pembroke State University. His collections of poetry include Horizons of Death (1934), Thanksgiving Before November (1936), We Thank You All the Time (1941), A Man in Midpassage (1947), Pure as Nowhere (1962), Selected Poems (1975), and The Distance: New and Selected Poems, 1928–1977 (1977). He also wrote the novels You Get What You Ask For (1939) and The Bitter Roots (1941) and the autobiography I Never Lost Anything in Istanbul (1978).

Robert Stubblefield has published fiction and personal essays in Dreamers and Desperadoes: Contemporary Short Fiction of the American West, Best Stories of the American West, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Left Bank, The Clackamas Literary Review, Cascadia Times, Oregon Humanities, Oregon Salmon: Essays on the State of the Fish at the Turn of the Millennium, Open Spaces, basalt, High Desert Journal, and The Whitefish Review among others. Awards include a Georges and Anne Borchardt scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Fishtrap Fellowship, and Imnaha Writers’ Retreat Fellowship. Robert grew up in eastern Oregon and now lives in Missoula, Montana and teaches at the University of Montana where he serves as Director of the BFA in Creative Writing and UM Press.

Shakespeare & Co. is pleased to host a reading by acclaimed author William T. Taylor on Monday, September 30 at 7:00 pm. Taylor will read from his new book Hoof Beats: How Horses Shaped Human History (University of California Press, 2024). This event is free and open to the public.

Author Bio
Dr. William T. Taylor is an Assistant Professor and Curator of Archaeology at the University of Colorado-Boulder, whose work explores the domestication of the horse and the ancient relationships between people and animals.

With active field research projects in “horse country” around the world, from the steppes of Eurasia to the Great Plains of North America and the Pampas of Argentina, his work brings together emerging technologies and cutting-edge scientific techniques alongside historic records, traditional knowledge, and personal experience to help tell the story of people and horses.

A National Geographic explorer and Fulbright scholar, William received his Ph.D. with distinction from the University of New Mexico where his research into ancient Mongolian horse cultures also received the Popejoy Award, the university’ top prize for dissertation research. His scholarship has been published in top-tier scientific journals including Science and PNAS, and has been funded by international granting agencies from National Geographic to the National Science Foundation. His research was awarded the 2023 Newcomb Cleveland Prize from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. 

About the Book
Journey to the ancient past with cutting-edge science and new data to discover how horses forever altered the course of human history.

From the Rockies to the Himalayas, the bond between horses and humans has spanned across time and civilizations. In this archaeological journey, William T. Taylor explores how momentous events in the story of humans and horses helped create the world we live in today. Tracing the horse's origins and spread from the western Eurasian steppes to the invention of horse-drawn transportation and the explosive shift to mounted riding, Taylor offers a revolutionary new account of how horses altered the course of human history. 

Drawing on Indigenous perspectives, ancient DNA, and new research from Mongolia to the Great Plains and beyond, Taylor guides readers through the major discoveries that have placed the horse at the origins of globalization, trade, biological exchange, and social inequality. Hoof Beats transforms our understanding of both horses and humanity's ancient past and asks us to consider what our relationship with horses means for the future of humanity and the world around us.

Shakespeare & Co. is pleased to host a book reading and discussion by celebrated journalist Rebecca McCarthy on Saturday, September 7, at 10:00 am. McCarthy will read from her new book Norman Maclean: A Life of Letters and Rivers (University of Washington Press, 2024). This event is free and open to the public.

Rebecca McCarthy is a writer who spent twenty-one years as an award-winning reporter at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Her work has been published in the New York Times, the American Scholar, Fast Company, and other venues.

Book Description:
In the first biography of one of Montana’s most celebrated writers, journalist Rebecca McCarthy presents a detailed and intimate portrait of Norman Maclean’s life and work, drawing on her long friendship with the author from the time she was a student at the University of Chicago through the rest of his life.

A River Runs Through It and Other Stories turned Norman Maclean into a late-in-life literary phenomenon and then a household name after the success of the Hollywood film based on the title story. Yet fewer know of Maclean’s lifelong struggles to reconcile very different parts of himself: the revered teacher and writer in the intellectual hub of Chicago and the Montana man compelled by the wildness and traumas of his home state and family, including the tragic Mann Gulch fire and the murder of his brother.

Irrepressible as a teacher, Maclean shared guidance, advice, campus and city rambles, and loyal friendship with generations of students. Behind the scenes, he honed an art as meditative and patient as his approach to fly fishing. McCarthy’s experiences intertwine with stories from friends, family, colleagues, and others to detail an incredibly rich life that seemed destined to remain divided—until the creation of his classic American story.

A vivid evocation of an iconic figure, Norman Maclean reveals the forces and events that shaped the author-educator and formed the bedrock of his beloved stories.

Shakespeare & Co. is pleased to host a reading by award-winning Laurel, Montana-based author A.J. Otjen on Friday, June 28, at 6:00 pm. Otjen will read from her new book Burned Over! The Survival of Montana Firefighter Dan Steffensen (Farcountry Press, May 2024). This event is free and open to the public.

A.J. Otjen lives in Laurel, Montana. Originally from Oklahoma, Dr. Agnes J. Otjen has been a professor of marketing for over twenty years at Montana State University in Billings. Before becoming a professor, she was a marketing executive for over twenty years, in Colorado, Nevada, and Missouri. In addition to numerous newspaper and journal articles, A.J. has written, collaborated on, and published children's books that have been accepted by Indian Education for All in the Office of Public Instruction and chosen for award recognition in 2023 by the Library of Congress.

About Burned Over!
In 2021, Montana firefighter Dan Steffensen tried to outrun a sixty-mile-an-hour wall of fire. But it overcame him, burning over 60% of his body. He should have died. The citizens of Red Lodge, Montana, needed him and prayed for his life. Three more tragedies hit his hometown during that Summer of Hell. Drawing from a wealth of interviews and research, author A.J. Otjen tells the inspiring story of how often first responders, doctors, and hundreds of good people stepped up to greatness. All the while, Dan fought his own internal battle to live or die.

Shakespeare & Co. is pleased to host a reading by acclaimed author Maxim Loskutoff on Wednesday, June 26, at 7:00 pm. Loskutoff will read from his new novel Old King (W.W. Norton & Company, June 2024). This event is free and open to the public.

Maxim Loskutoff is the award-winning author of Old King, Ruthie Fear and Come West and See. His stories and essays have appeared in numerous periodicals, including the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Ploughshares, and GQ. He lives in the Rocky Mountains of western Montana.

About Old King
In this haunting novel about the end of the frontier dream, a man tries to reinvent himself in one of America’s last wild territories, while his neighbor begins a crime spree that will tremble the nation.

In the summer of 1976, Duane Oshun finds himself stranded in a remote Montana town beset by a series of strange and menacing events. He takes a job as a logger and builds a cabin on an isolated road near a reclusive neighbor—a hermit named Ted Kaczynski.

The two men are captivated by the valley’s endangered old-growth forest, but Kaczynski’s violent grievances against modern society soon threaten the lives of all those around him. As Kaczynski’s bombs crescendo to the book’s devastating conclusion, Old King wrestles with the birth of the modern environmental movement, the accelerating dominion of technology in American life, and a new kind of violence that lives next door.

Told in four parts sweeping across two decades, Old King establishes Maxim Loskutoff as one of the most thrilling and inventive authors of the American west, a writer “endowed with fearless audacity, stunning grace, and gutsy heart” (Nickolas Butler).

The Center for Large Landscape Conservation and partners are proud to present a reading by conservation journalist Ben Goldfarb from his most recent book Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet, a scientific and literary feat, highlighting the impact of the 40 million miles of roadways that encircle our planet. For wildlife and ecosystems, roads are forces of disruption and at times causes of death. The reading will be followed by a Q&A with Ben and wildlife crossing expert Kylie Paul from the Center. On Tuesday, June 25th, join us at Shakespeare & Co. in Missoula at 7 pm to learn about this important issue and how emerging science can reduce and potentially reverse the damage caused!

Ben Goldfarb is the author of Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet, named one of the best books of 2023 by the New York Times, and Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, winner of the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. His writing has appeared in the Atlantic, National Geographic, the New York Times, and many other publications, and has been anthologized in The Best American Science and Nature Writing. A recipient of fellowships from the Alicia Patterson Foundation and the Whiting Foundation, he lives in Colorado.

Kylie Paul is a member of the linear infrastructure team at the Center for Large Landscape Conservation. As a Road Ecologist, she brings her expertise into improving local, state, and federal projects, programs, and policies to better address the impacts of roads and other linear infrastructure on wildlife. She leads several coalitions working to bring more wildlife crossing structures to the western U.S. and has authored a number of reports sharing best practices for engaging in wildlife crossing efforts. 

The Center for Large Landscape Conservation is a Montana-based nonprofit that works both locally and globally to promote ecological connectivity, support healthy wildlife habitats, and safeguard nature’s resilience to climate change.

About Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet:
An eye-opening account of the global ecological transformations wrought by roads, from the award-winning author of Eager.

Some 40 million miles of roadways encircle the earth, yet we tend to regard them only as infrastructure for human convenience. While roads are so ubiquitous they’re practically invisible to us, wild animals experience them as entirely alien forces of death and disruption. In Crossings, environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb travels throughout the United States and around the world to investigate how roads have transformed our planet. A million animals are killed by cars each day in the U.S. alone, but as the new science of road ecology shows, the harms of highways extend far beyond roadkill. Creatures from antelope to salmon are losing their ability to migrate in search of food and mates; invasive plants hitch rides in tire treads; road salt contaminates lakes and rivers; and the very noise of traffic chases songbirds from vast swaths of habitat.

Yet road ecologists are also seeking to blunt the destruction through innovative solutions. Goldfarb meets with conservationists building bridges for California’s mountain lions and tunnels for English toads, engineers deconstructing the labyrinth of logging roads that web national forests, animal rehabbers caring for Tasmania’s car-orphaned wallabies, and community organizers working to undo the havoc highways have wreaked upon American cities.

Today, as our planet’s road network continues to grow exponentially, the science of road ecology has become increasingly vital. Written with passion and curiosity, Crossings is a sweeping, spirited, and timely investigation into how humans have altered the natural world—and how we can create a better future for all living beings.

Shakespeare & Co. is pleased to host celebrated film critic and author Kenneth Turan for an evening of film appreciation and conversation on Monday, June 24, at 7:00pm. We may even show a film, so stay tuned for further details! This event is free and open to the public.

Kenneth Turan was film critic for the The Los Angeles Times for nearly 30 years as well as for NPR’s Morning Edition. His books include Never Coming To A Theater Near You and Not To Be Missed: 54 Favorites From A Lifetime of Film. He is currently writing a dual biography of Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg for Yale’s Jewish Lives series, scheduled for early 2025 publication.

Shakespeare & Co. is pleased to host a reading by acclaimed author Sally Thompson on Saturday, June 15, at 10:00 am. Thompson will read from her new book Disturbing the Sleeping Buffalo: 23 Unexpected Stories that Awaken Montana's Past (Farcountry Press, July 2024). This event is free and open to the public.

Anthropologist Sally Thompson's long career in the Rocky Mountains and American Southwest has spanned more than four decades. She received her Ph.D. at the University of Colorado in 1980, the same year she moved to Missoula. She has worked as an archaeologist, ethnohistorian, and tribal consultant and collaborator, and also filmmaker. She has published a monograph and numerous articles in professional journals as well as in Montana, the Magazine of Western History. Her 2015 book, People Before the Park, published by the Montana Historical Society, was a collaboration with the Kootenai Culture Committee and the Pikunni Traditionalist Association of the Blackfeet Tribe.

About Disturbing the Sleeping Buffalo
If Lewis and Clark returned to Montana today, they would find the landscape reassuringly familiar. The same would hold true for past generations of Kootenai, Salish, Crow, Gros Ventre, Assiniboine, and Blackfeet. Even after thousands of years, some ancestors could still find their way to Sun River country, an ancient oasis of water and wildlife where the mountains and prairies meet.

The past still lingers along old trails, and among the people who live here today. Some, such as anthropologist and storyteller Sally Thompson, are better equipped to notice the traces of history lurking in place names and written in cairns, carved in tree bark, etched into prairie boulders, or resting among well-knapped spear points.

In Disturbing the Sleeping Buffalo, Thompson unearths new information and startling insights into Montana's untold history in twenty-three true stories. Along the way, she shares the challenges of groundbreaking research and the joys of finding hidden treasures. These stories connect past and present, bringing into focus a common heritage among many peoples in an uncommon land.

Shakespeare & Co. is pleased to host a reading by celebrated author and former University of Montana professor Casey Charles on Wednesday, June 12, at 7:00 pm. Charles will read from his new book Undetectable: An HIV Memoir (Running Wild Press, May 2024). This event is free and open to the public.

As a lawyer, activist, and professor of English at the University of Montana, Casey Charles focused primarily on LGBTQ rights and representation. His first book, The Sharon Kowalski Case: Lesbian and Gay Rights on Trial, part of the Famous American Trials Series out of Kansas, became a finalist for a Publishing Triangle Award in 2003. A book of essays on queer law and film appeared in 2012 (Ashgate). A book of poems (Controlled Burn) was recognized as one of Missoula Independent’s best books of the year in 2017, and two poetry volumes have since been published.

More recently Charles has written two novels—The Trials of Christopher Mann (Regal Crest), which takes place during the Dan White trial in 1979 San Francisco, and The Monkey Cages (Lethe 2018) a story set in 1955, during the famous Boys of Boise scandal in Idaho. Two ethnographic essays about HIV long-term survivors (HIVLTS) in Kenya and India appear in the anthology HIV, Sex, and Sexuality in Later Life (Policy Press 2022).

Charles’ latest book, Undetectable: An HIV Memoir is forthcoming from Running Wild Press.

Casey now splits his time between Missoula, where he hikes and skis, and Palm Springs, where he walks his dog in the canyons.

About Undetectable: An HIV Memoir
Undetectable is a story of love, loss, and viral loads, a memoir of long-term survival with HIV. From New York graduate student in 1989, who contracts the virus from the love of his life to Montana writer in 2018 visiting the slums of Nairobi, the author finds his own drama intertwined with the astonishing stories of his HIV+ peers, narratives that intersect the path of his travails and act as foils to the foibles of a gay man who comes out, falls in love, and faces a death sentence at the beginning of his career. In his fight for drugs, friends, and support, Charles learns the power of linking self to other as he confronts stigma, heartbreak, and fear with a visceral resilience. By discovering the power of community, Undetectable explores a generation of long-term HIV survivors who have lived to tell the story of an AIDS pandemic now in its fifth decade without cure or vaccine.