Shakespeare & Co. is pleased to host a reading and discussion with Missoula-based author Luke Larkin on Tuesday, August 25, 2026, at 7:00pm. Larkin, a University of Montana graduate, will read from his debut novel, The Unheld (Hyperion Avenue, August 2026). This event is free and open to the public.

About The Unheld:
Startling monsters and occult oddities abound in this chilling horror Western as a girl journeys across the haunted Montana Territory to rescue her father from an otherworldly creature.

Charlie’s life is a lonely one. While other twelve-year-olds are in school, she spends her days skinning the animals her mercurial father hunts in the woods just outside their cabin. And the woods and its twisted creatures—an owl with four wings, a boar with two heads, a fox with gills—are becoming stranger by the day.

One night, a nightmarish beast appears and drags Charlie’s father into the wilderness. To find him, she enlists the aid of two unlikely allies also in search of the beast: an Englishman with a connection to a mysterious occult society and a Northern Cheyenne policeman exiled for a crime he didn’t commit. Yet as the trio prepare for the confrontation with the beast, Charlie must decide if her father, a brusque man who has always withheld his affection, is ultimately worth saving.

With its blend of Western grit and supernatural menace, The Unheld is an unsettling and atmospheric horror novel about loneliness, human connection, and how we find each other in a world that seems designed to alienate. With this assured debut, Luke Larkin marks his arrival in the genre and proves the American frontier still harbors untapped stories in its shadows.

Author Biography:
Luke Larkin is a Missoula-based, queer author living and working in Big Sky Country. He received his MFA in creative writing from the University of Montana, and his published fiction, nonfiction, and poetry center the confluences of connection, identity, and place. The Unheld, his debut novel, is slated to release on August 25, 2026 from Hyperion Avenue, with a second novel expected in 2027.

Shakespeare & Co. is pleased to host a reading and reception with Missoula-based crime writer Russell Thayer and co-author M.E. Proctor, on Tuesday, August 4th, at 7:00 pm. Thayer will read from his new book Kansas City Breakdown. Published by Cowboy Jamboree Press, this is the anticipated follow up to Bop City Swing, released last year. The lead characters are back: San Francisco Homicide Detective Tom Keegan and his unlikely ally Vivian Davis, aka Gunselle, a professional assassin.

About Kansas City Breakdown:
Mobsters, molls, and muscle are meeting in Kansas City to carve out territory, make deals, assert influence. They come from Chicago, Dallas, New Orleans, Detroit … By plane, by car, and, in the case of mid-level heavy Mike Abati, by train from San Francisco.

The FBI sees an opportunity. A chance to get close to the man, gather information, and have eyes and ears on the conference. A honey trap.

Tom Keegan, San Francisco PD homicide detective, knows the right woman for the job. She’s smart and cool. Seductive. Fearless. A rare and fiery combination of brass and sass. Would she agree to put her life on the line? If her cover is blown, she’s dead.

Besides, Vivian Davis, aka professional assassin Gunselle, doesn’t do favors for cops.

But Tom’s doing the asking and it makes Vivian’s heart beat a little faster.

The job isn’t all it appears to be. It comes with a side of betrayal. Because, after all, a girl has to look out for herself.

Author Biographies:
Russell Thayer’s work has appeared in magazines like Mystery Tribune, Bristol Noir, Rock and a Hard Place, and Literary Garage. He’s working on a short story collection. Russell received his BA in English from the University of Washington and currently lives in Missoula, Montana.

M.E. Proctor lives in Texas. She’s the author of the Declan Shaw detective mysteries and the author of two short story collections. She co-wrote two retro-noirs with Russell Thayer, Bop City Swing and Kansas City Breakdown. Her fiction has appeared in various magazines and anthologies. She’s a Shamus Award and Derringer Award short story nominee.

Shakespeare & Co. is pleased to host a reading and discussion with Krista Diamond on Tuesday, July 21, 2026, at 7:00 pm. Diamond will read from her debut novel, Close Relationships with Strangers (Simon & Schuster, June 2026). This event is free and open to the public.

About Close Relationships with Strangers:
Close Relationships with Strangers follows a Las Vegas wildlife photographer who moves to Los Angeles to become a paparazzo and in the process loses his relationships, his morals, and eventually his tether to reality.

Reviled by celebrities and the public, Ben is one of the last remaining paparazzi scouring the streets of Los Angeles. Amateurs with camera phones, social media, and a lack of bonafide stars have slowly killed a once essential role in the Hollywood apparatus. Jack Whitlock is one of the last remaining A-listers, and Ben has followed his career since the years he spent bussing tables at a diner in Las Vegas where his most popular movie once filmed a scene.

When Jack Whitlock is suddenly embroiled in a sex scandal, Ben begins his pursuit, eager for both a big paycheck and a chance to be close to the elusive star. Along the way, he is haunted by mistakes from his past: the photos he took of a pop star that have led to death threats, the ghost of his failed relationship with a burlesque dancer named Ellory, and his abandoned dream of being a wildlife photographer.

Searing and propulsive, Close Relationships with Strangers is a behind the lens tour-de-force through the streets of Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and the desert in between, as readers follow Ben, unrelenting, obsessive, and wry, on a quest that will lead either to his redemption or demise.

Author Biography:
Krista Diamond’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The New York Times, The Paris Review, Cosmopolitan, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the University of Nevada Las Vegas and her work has been supported by Bread Loaf, Tin House, and the Nevada Arts Council. She lives in Las Vegas. Close Relationships with Strangers is her debut novel.

Shakespeare & Co. is pleased to host a reading and discussion with author Miriam Horn. Horn will discuss her new book, Homesick for a World Unknown: The Life of George B. Schaller (Penguin Press, April 2026).  She is joined by Ben Jimenez, a field biologist who accompanied Schaller to Tibet twice (in 2011 and 2012), to capture and collar Tibetan brown bears.

About Homesick for a World Unknown: The Life of George B. Schaller:
In this riveting portrait of George B. Schaller, the world’s leading field biologist, Miriam Horn captures the seventy years he spent living among wild animals in the world’s remotest regions, forever altering how we see—and save—the natural world

In 1959, though just twenty-six years old and a graduate student, George B. Schaller shrugged off warnings of mortal danger and set off for the Belgian Congo to do what no other scientist had dared: study mountain gorillas, the real King Kong, by living alongside them. Boldly refusing arms and retinue, Schaller and his wife, Kay, established a home in the jungle and came to share the apes’ rhythms and rules. After more than two years of immersive research—a groundbreaking methodology he would spend his life honing—Schaller transformed how the world viewed gorillas; they were not murderous brutes but tender creatures, and more like humans than any twentieth-century scientist had recognized. His mission to revolutionize our perceptions of wild animals would propel him across four continents and inspire generations of scientists.

In Homesick for a World Unknown, Miriam Horn draws on thousands of pages from Schaller’s journals and letters, globe-spanning interviews, and two journeys into the field with the legendary scientist himself to trace his emergence as the founding father of modern wildlife conservation. She probes what drives him to know Earth’s wildest places and most fearsome creatures, beginning with a childhood upended by displacement and atrocity. Born in Berlin in 1933 to an American socialite married to a German diplomat during the Nazi era, the young Schaller was moved from one occupied country to another before finally arriving with his mother in the U.S. in 1947, as an enemy alien. It was in the Missouri woods that teenage George found a place of respite and at the University of Alaska that he found both his calling and a lifelong partner in Kay.

In the decades following his work in the Congo, Schaller went on to conduct the earliest studies of Indian tigers, Serengeti lions, Brazilian jaguars, Chinese pandas, and Tibetan brown bears, meticulously cataloging their private lives. He navigated acute danger, violent conflict, and treacherous politics in pursuit of empathy for and preservation of creatures big and small. It was Schaller who first guided Jane Goodall on her chimp study in Tanzania and led Peter Matthiessen into Nepal in search of the snow leopard. And while remaking wildlife science, his impact went further still: he spurred the creation of vast national parks and partnered with local communities to protect the homes they share with these animals. A vivid and captivating account of the adventurous life of George B. Schaller, here is the definitive portrait of the man who dared to challenge us to rethink our place in the natural world.

Author Biography:
Miriam Horn is a bestselling author, environmental advocate, journalist, and filmmaker. Her previous books include Rebels in White Gloves, Earth: The Sequel (coauthor), and Rancher, Farmer, Fisherman. She produced two as documentary films, with one premiering at Sundance. Before turning to books, Horn worked at the Environmental Defense Fund and the US Forest Service, and wrote for magazines and newspapers, including The New York Times. She lives in Colorado, in the South San Juan Mountains.

Shakespeare & Co. is delighted to host a reading and discussion with Montana author Thomas Craeg on Friday, June 19, 2026, at 6:00 pm. Craeg will read from his debut novel Sword in the Heart (Swan River Press, 2026). This event is free and open to the public.

About Sword in the Heart:
FBI Agent Greg Wesson leads a team of federal agents, military experts and local investigators pursuing a group assassinating American oligarchs. Along the way, he finds himself admiring the killers. Their victims are people Wesson has tried and failed for years to put in prison, including the one who murdered his wife.

Author Biography:
Craig Thomas Naylor lives near Kalispell, Montana, where he writes poetry and articles, composes music, teaches Aikido, and tends an orchard of mostly antique apple varieties planted on land homesteaded by his wife’s great-grandparents. His first novel, Sword in the Heart, published under his pen name, Thomas Craeg, is available on Amazon and an ever-widening selection of local bookstores throughout Montana. Other publications include Montana Senior News, Whitefish Review, and an upcoming issue of Sensations Magazine. He is a critique reader for Whitefish Review. He has been accepted to the prestigious Elk River Writers Workshop in the fall of 2026.

From 2020-2025 Craig was President of Authors of the Flathead, a collective of writers in NW Montana, and currently serves as past-president. He coordinated the annual Flathead River Writers Conference from 2020-2024. He currently is co-coordinator of the annual Student Writing Competition.

Join award-winning science journalist Hillary Rosner on Wednesday, May 27, 2026, at 7:00pm for for a lively conversation about her book Roam: Wild Animals and the Race to Repair Our Fractured World, the inspiring story of reconnecting ecosystems, restoring wildlife corridors, and reimagining a future where humans and animals can thrive together. Rosner will explore some of the stories she tells in the book in a conversation with author, environmental philosopher, and University of Montana professor Christopher J. Preston, followed by an audience Q&A featuring a panel of local conservation experts. The discussion will touch on how the movement to reconnect critical landscapes is playing out in Montana. This event is presented in partnership with the Center for Large Landscape Conservation and the Vital Ground Foundation.

About Roam: Wild Animals and the Race to Repair Our Fractured World:
What if saving our home planet starts with giving other species space to roam? How can we reshape our human-built landscapes to serve both people and wildlife?

These are the questions that Hillary Rosner attempts to answer in Roam, an urgent quest to figure out how to stitch our fragmented planet back together. It’s about the people trying to reconstruct landscapes where animals can once again move freely, as they did for millennia. It’s about reconnecting Earth so that wild species and natural systems have room to adapt and thrive. It's about seeing wildlife as the guides we need to lead us to adapt to climate change.

Humans have always altered the landscapes around us; in some ways, it’s part of what defines us as a species. But since the middle of the last century, we’ve changed the Earth on an overwhelming scale. Our infrastructure, our hunger for resources, our methods of farming, traveling and living—all these have rendered our planet inhospitable for the other species that live here. As a result, all over the globe, animals are stranded—by roads, fences, drainage systems, industrial farms, and cities. They simply cannot move around to access their daily needs. Yet as climate change reshapes the planet in its own ways, many creatures will, increasingly, have to move in order to survive.

This book illustrates a massive and underreported problem: how a completely human-centered view of the world has impacted the ability of other species to move around. But it’s also about solutions and hope: How we can forge new links between landscapes that have become isolated pieces. How we can stitch ecosystems back together, so that the processes still work, and the systems can evolve as they need to. How we can build a world in which humans recognize their interconnectedness with the rest of the planet, and view other species with empathy and compassion.

Author Biography:
Hillary Rosner has reported on environmental issues from around the world for outlets such as National Geographic, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Scientific American, Audubon and many others. She specializes in telling complex science stories in ways that resonate deeply with general audiences.

Moderator:
Christopher J. Preston is a writer, a professor of philosophy, and a one-time commercial fisherman who is obsessed with the sight of freshly falling snow. The most inflated title he ever possessed was Distinguished Visiting Fellow in the Ethics of the Anthropocene.

Sponsoring Organizations:
The Center for Large Landscape Conservation advances ecological connectivity for climate resilience worldwide through science, policy, practice, and collaboration.

The Vital Ground Foundation is a land trust that conserves and connects habitat for grizzly bears and other wildlife. They also team up with communities to prevent conflicts between bears and people.

Shakespeare & Co. is pleased to host a reading and discussion with Danilo John Thomas on Monday, May 18, 2026, at 7:00 pm. Thomas, born and raised in Southwestern Montana, will read from his new short story collection, Ore Vein: Stories (Veliz Books, March 2026). This event is free and open to the public.

About Ore Vein: Stories:
Ore Vein, the debut short story collection by Danilo John Thomas, explores the thin spaces between hardship and heroism prevalent in small-town America. Thomas captures what it feels like to come of age among the urban decay and cracked pastoral landscapes of Southwestern Montana and a fictionalized version of the town where he was raised. From the claustrophobia of crumbling mine shafts to the senseless consequences of bar brawls, these stories are at once mystical and all too real, violent yet deeply introspective, masculine but tender.

In “Gift Horse” Tarin and her father, an aging football star, are visited by the children of a childhood friend, and they want to go fishing in the mountains . . . in the middle of the night; in “Beating the Dead” Pinpurse kills snakes with his sister hoping to dredge up some sympathy. Instead, he faces some hard truths; and in “Birdbone,” a horrific mine accident buries Tom Birdbone. Unable to go back underground after being rescued, he finds a job in an import warehouse where the demands of furnishing the rich may come at too high a cost.

Ore Vein, like the mines it showcases, digs deep in dark places after fortunes, showing what it means to hit the mother lode and, sometimes, what it means to lose it.

Author Biography:
Danilo John Thomas is the author of the short story collection, Ore Vein (Veliz Books, 2026) and two chapbooks, The Hand Implements (The Cupboard Pamphlet, 2017), and Murk (AB Gorham, 2012). A graduate of the PhD program in creative writing at Florida State University, he is recently the co-publisher at Octopus Books, managing and prose editor at Baobab Press, and assistant managing editor at The Kenyon Review. Born and raised in Southwestern Montana, he now lives in Omaha, Nebraska, with his wife, two daughters, and one toothsome staffy.

Shakespeare & Co. is pleased to host a reading and discussion with Métis poet and expressionist painter Carrie Ann McCoy on Wednesday, April 22, 2026, at 7:00pm. McCoy will read selections from her poetry collection, Searching for Yellow (in a world so blue). This event is free and open to the public.

About Searching for Yellow (in a world so blue):
Searching for Yellow (in a world so blue) is a yearlong cycle of poems, prayers, and ponderings.

The book reads as a symphony shaped from Sunday nights—that quiet threshold between what has been and what is coming. Composed as five thematic movements, with fifty-two works, there is a pause in each week of the year. The book moves gently through nature, including birth, grief, loss, and return. The arc says:

something old stood down
something carried us through
the noise finally stopped
and morning arrived

Each piece tends a deliberate light, attending to the sacred within ordinary hours. This book is about noticing—how color reenters a life, how hope survives its own dimming, how beauty persists even when the world feels washed in blue.

Author Biography:
Carrie Ann McCoy—Chief Sun Woman—is a Métis poet and expressionist painter. While she has many stories to tell in longer forms, she has become increasingly drawn to the abstract language of poetry and painting. Within these forms, she believes there is space for readers and viewers to discover their own meaning, healing, and inspiration.

Carrie Ann published her first poem at the age of seven and later studied poetry at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon with American author Kim Stafford through the Oregon Writing Project. Her writing has appeared in several magazines addressing themes of shadow trauma and public education.

She comes from a family deeply connected to military service, as the daughter, granddaughter, and sister of Foreign War veterans. Carrie Ann later completed additional work with the Oregon Writing Project at Southern Oregon University while earning her master’s degree, focusing on civics and immigration reform policy.

Throughout her career she has served in a variety of educational roles, including adjunct professor at Concordia University Portland and School Improvement Specialist with the U.S. Department of Education.

It seems Ms. McCoy may be destined, as William Shakespeare once wrote, to carry her “tiny candle” and shine a few good deeds into a sometimes “naughty world.”

Shakespeare & Co. is pleased to host a reading and discussion with Missoula-based author Lee Klinger Lesser on Wednesday, April 22, 2026, at 5:30 pm. Lesser will read selections from her new book, Return to Our Senses: A Path to Stability in an Unstable World (Bell Ringer Press, April 2026). This event is free and open to the public.

About Return to Our Senses: A Path to Stability in an Unstable World:
Wars, economic insecurity, climate change, social upheaval: We live in a deeply unstable time—one in which circumstances seem to conspire against personal equanimity and mindful action. That’s why Lee Klinger Lesser wrote Return to Our Senses: A Path to Stability in an Unstable World. Klinger Lesser is a longtime teacher of Sensory Awareness, a somatic mindfulness practice that helps us settle into the moment and find purpose and joy in it. By returning to our breath, our senses, and our body we build resilience, calm, and the ability to respond to challenges in mindful, creative, and constructive ways. In these times of overlapping crises, we need these skills more than ever. Klinger Lesser has worked with people who have been on the front lines—both literally and figuratively—of some of the most frightening and traumatic events human beings can confront. She’s helped military veterans, survivors of sexual assault, prison inmates, wildland firefighters and many others find peace and engage more effectively in the world.

Throughout Return to Our Senses, Klinger Lesser shares step-by-step practices that readers can use anytime to cultivate peace and clarity, and to meet the needs of any given moment. “As we navigate our way through personal challenges and the precarious future we are facing on our shared planet, how we meet each moment affects our lives and the lives of those around us,” she writes. The many stories she shares from her work show the transformative power of Sensory Awareness in action. They include a wrongly convicted prisoner on death row who has become an advocate for justice and a mentor to people around the world; a military veteran, struggling addict and victim of childhood abuse who went on to become a lawyer making a difference; and many more.

Klinger Lesser learned the practice of Sensory Awareness from Charlotte Selver, who pioneered these skills at another time when the world was in crisis. Surviving Nazi Germany, Selver immigrated to the US and went on to teach Sensory Awareness throughout the world—often with Klinger Lesser beside her. In Return to Our Senses, Klinger Lesser makes the invaluable practice of Sensory Awareness accessible to readers far and wide and invites us to use it to transform ourselves and the world.

Author Biography:
Lee Klinger Lesser has devoted a lifetime to the study and practice of embodied awareness, education, and service. Her work is based on a deep respect for our inherent connection with nature, the resilience of the human spirit, and the power of community. She studied Sensory Awareness with Charlotte Selver, the founder of this practice in the United States, and has been offering the practice nationally and internationally for fifty years. Lee lived at the San Francisco Zen Center from 1978 to 1983, and Zen practice has continued to inform and enrich her life.

She holds a master’s degree in education from Bank Street College, and has worked as an early childhood educator, coach, and college instructor focusing on equity and family support. Lee began offering programs to military veterans in 2008 and was the co-founder of Veteran’s PATH, a nonprofit organization that served military veterans through mindfulness, community, and nature-based programs from 2015 to 2023. Her teaching and facilitation extend to diverse and often demanding contexts, including trainings for wildland firefighters, retreats for climate activists, and long-term work with communities facing stress, uncertainty, and change. Lee teaches Sensory Awareness bilingually in Mexico and Spain, bringing embodied practices across cultures and languages.

She is also a mother and grandmother, roles that continue to enrich and expand her life. A deepest hope is that we will join together and work towards a better future for the children and future generations on our precious planet.

Shakespeare & Co. is delighted to host a reading and discussion with Helena-based author Gabriel Furshong on Thursday, April 9, 2026 at 7:00 pm. Furshong will read from his new poetry collection, Surrounding the Country a Chasm. This event is free and open to the public.

About Surrounding the Country a Chasm:
“In this powerful collection, Gabriel Furshong transforms heart- wrenching stories of lives irrevocably changed by the horrors of civil war in Guatemala. These poems enact one of literature’s oldest and most noble missions—to bear witness. With stalwart dedication and fierce attention to his poetic influences, Czesław Miłosz and Carolyn Forché, and with the precision of a journalist, Furshong crafts poems that honor the particular circumstances of the individuals captured in these lines while performing the literary alchemy that allows them to also call to mind the 200,000 people who were killed in this brutal conflict. Careful never to appropriate, Furshong faithfully reports stories he was told by survivors that, without this poetic account, might have been erased. These poems are as relevant now as they were when they were first begun in 2005—with our country just as culpable in atrocities here and overseas.”
—Jennifer Franklin, author of A Fire in Her Brain

“Although the poems in Gabriel Furshong’s Surrounding the Country a Chasm are set in the aftermath of the brutal thirty-six-year civil war in Guatemala, which ended in 1996, they take seriously a question especially resonant in our time: how to bear witness to the suffering of others, our “eyes for looking and seeing / all that passes beyond reach.” Furshong approaches his task with restraint, with respect as well as exactitude, which results in poems that are both quiet—a whisper in a church or at a funeral—and devastating. He witnesses the reburial of a child pulled from a mass grave, “a scrap of rotten cloth [matched] to a bright bolt in the cupboard” and the marks of barbed wire “twisted turn by turn” beneath a man’s sleeve. The diction of these poems is deceptively simple, the images crystalline, powerfully conveying the trauma of war borne by those who survive it.” —Melissa Kwasny, author of The Cloud Path

Author Biography:
Gabriel Furshong is a father, writer, and teacher from Helena, Montana. He reports for The Nation, High Country News, Montana Quarterly, and other magazines. His poetry and nonfiction can be found at Westerly, Tahoma Review, and elsewhere.

Shakespeare & Co. is delighted to host a virtual launch for Vengeance is Mine (Boiler House Press, March 2026), the 1943 Holocaust novella by Friedrich Torberg available for the first time in English, on Thursday, April 2, 2026, at 7:00 pm. This event is free and open to the public.

Taking part in the event will be Stephanie Ortega, the translator of Vengeance is Mine, and Menachem Kaiser, author of Plunder: A Memoir of Family Property and Nazi Treasure, who wrote the introduction. Brad Bigelow, the editor of the Recovered Books series from Boiler House Press, will moderate the event.

About Vengeance is Mine:
One morning in November 1940, two men meet on a New Jersey dock. One, haggard and haunted, says he’s waiting for 75 refugees from Hitler’s Germany. Every day he comes, and every day he leaves—alone.

Over a drink in a nearby bar, he relates the story of his imprisonment in a pre-war Nazi concentration camp. Of the SS commandant who separated out all the Jewish inmates and set about a deliberate program to kill them one by one, by torture, beatings, or suicide. Until the day when one inmate found himself faced with a decision: was vengeance, as it says in the Torah, a matter for God alone?

Written in 1943 and never before translated into English, Vengeance is Mine [German title: Mein ist die Rache] is the first work of fiction to predict the Nazi’s final solution, their program to exterminate the Jews. Its story is short, stunning, and unforgettable: a 20th century masterpiece.

About Stephanie Ortega:
With a doctorate in German literature, Stephanie Ortega has taught in Berlin, South Africa, and the U.S. She translated Else Jerusalem’s Red House Alley for the Recovered Books series and lives in Austin, Texas.

About Menachem Kaiser:
The winner of a Fulbright scholarship, his research in Lithuania was the basis of his book Plunder: A Memoir of Family Property and Nazi Treasure, which received the 2022 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature.

About Brad Bigelow:
Brad Bigelow is a writer, teacher, and editor living in Missoula, Montana. He is the editor of the Recovered Books series for Boiler House Press and has been writer of the Neglected Books website since 2006. With more than six hundred articles, the site celebrates the work of little-known writers like Virginia Faulkner.

About The Westerns:
From award-winning historian Megan Kate Nelson, an epic account of the creation of the American West in the 19th century, shattering the traditional frontier myth that has dominated popular American culture.

The Westerners tells two richly detailed and interwoven stories. The first reveals the captivating lives of women and men moving through the American West—Indigenous peoples, Black Americans, Mexican Americans, and Canadian and Asian immigrants—in the 19th century. The second tracks the attempts of many Americans to erase these westerners from history, through a frontier myth that lionized individualism and conquest and celebrated white settlers traveling west in search of prosperity.

Nelson’s vivid, eye-opening account centers on seven extraordinary individuals whose lives capture the true history of the frontier: Sacajawea, not just Lewis and Clark’s guide but an explorer who forged her own path; Jim Beckwourth, a biracial fur trader whose sharp cultural insight made him indispensable; María Gertrudis Barceló, a Hispana gambling saloon owner who broke every stereotype to become the wealthiest woman in Santa Fe; Ovando Hollister, a gold miner, soldier, and newspaper man who championed Western expansion; Little Wolf, a Northern Cheyenne chief whose courageous leadership secured his people’s future; Canadian immigrant Ella Watson, who strove to become a ranch woman in a male-dominated world; and the defiant Polly Bemis, a Chinese immigrant who carved out a life in Idaho despite federal expulsion efforts.

Nelson roots this bold new history of the American West in the deep research and gripping storytelling that have garnered her critical acclaim. Highlighting the perseverance and ingenuity of the communities that have otherwise been forgotten or erased from history, The Westerners challenges us to reimagine who we are and where we came from.

Author Biography:
Born and raised in Colorado, Megan Kate Nelson is a writer and historian now based in Boston, Massachusetts. She has written about US western history, the Civil War, and American culture for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Slate, Time, and Smithsonian Magazine. Nelson earned her BA in history and literature from Harvard University and her PhD in American studies from the University of Iowa. She is the author of Saving Yellowstone; The Three-Cornered War, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Ruin Nation; and Trembling Earth.

Shakespeare & Co., in partnership with the University of Montana Environmental Studies Program, is delighted to host a reading and discussion with award-winning author Cassidy Randall on Thursday, February 5, 2026 at 7:00pm. Randall, a University of Montana alum and the 2026 Kittredge Distinguished Visiting Writer in Environmental Studies, will read from her new book Thirty Below: The Harrowing and Heroic Story of the First All-Women's Ascent of Denali (Abrams, 2025). This event is free and open to the public.

About Thirty Below: The Harrowing and Heroic Story of the First All-Women's Ascent of Denali:
Cassidy Randall draws on extensive archival research and original interviews to tell an engrossing, edge-of-the-seat adventure story about a forgotten group of climbers who had the audacity to believe that women could walk alone in extraordinary and treacherous heights.

Grace Hoeman dreamed of standing on top of Denali. The tallest peak in North America, the fierce polar mountain loomed large in many climbers' imaginations, and Grace, a doctor in Alaska, had come close to the top, only to be turned back by altitude sickness and a storm that took the lives of seven fellow climbers in one remorseless blow.

Other expeditions denied her a place because of her gender, and when a letter arrived from a climber in California named Arlene Blum, who'd also been barred from expeditions—unless she stayed in base camp and cooked for the men, Grace got a defiant idea: she would organize and lead the first-ever all-female ascent of the frozen Alaskan peak.

Everyone told the "Denali Damsels," as the team called themselves, that it couldn't be done: Women were incapable of climbing mountains on their own. Men had walked on the moon; women still had not stood on the highest points on Earth. But these six women were unwilling to be limited by sexists and misogynists. They pushed past barriers in society at large, the climbing world, and their own bodies.

Author Biography:
Cassidy Randall is an award-winning writer who tells stories on the environment, adventure, and people who expand human potential. Her stories have appeared in Rolling Stone, National Geographic, the New York Times, TIME, Atavist, Outside, and Men’s Journal, among others. She wrote The Hard Parts with Paralympian Oksana Masters, which won an Alex Award from the American Library Association and was listed as one of the best sports books of the year by the Times. Her work has been awarded the Lowell Thomas Gold Medal in Adventure Writing, short-listed for the True Story Award, and included in The Year’s Best Sports Writing. She lives in Montana.

Shakespeare & Co. is delighted to host a reading and discussion with award-winning author David Guterson on Tuesday, February 3, 2026 at 7:00 pm. Guterson will read from his new novel Evelyn in Transit (W. W. Norton & Co., January 2026) and be in conversation with celebrated novelist Emily Ruskovich. This event is free and open to the public.

About Evelyn in Transit:
A crystalline short novel about defying expectations, hitting the road, and seeking the right way to live.

Radically open-minded, formidably strong, and unusually clear-eyed about herself and others, Evelyn Bednarz has always been a misfit. She’s easily bored, unsuited to life at school, asks odd questions about faith and time, and sees through conventions others take for granted. Seeking to be true to herself, she hitchhikes across the American West taking odd jobs.

In distant Tibet, another life unfolds as remote from Evelyn’s as can be: the life of a boy named Tsering, raised as a Buddhist monk in the mountains of Tibet, who eventually becomes a high lama.

And yet, their lives are strangely linked—as Evelyn discovers when a trio of Buddhist lamas show up at her door to announce that her five-year-old son Cliff is the seventh reincarnation of the illustrious Norbu Rinpoche, recently deceased. The lamas’ visit sets off a family crisis and a media firestorm over Cliff’s future.

Written in a spare, precise style of extraordinary beauty, full of surprising humor and luminosity, Evelyn in Transit delivers much-needed insight and compassion about humanity’s strivings for transcendence, and what it might mean to “live the right way.”

Author Biographies:
David Guterson is the author of thirteen books, including the PEN/Faulkner Award winner Snow Falling on Cedars, which was made into a major motion picture, translated into twenty-five languages, and has sold more than 4 million copies worldwide. He lives on Bainbridge Island, Washington.

Emily Ruskovich grew up in the Idaho Panhandle on Hoodoo Mountain. She is the fourth American ever to win the Dublin International Literary Award for her debut novel, Idaho, which has been translated into a dozen languages. Emily has also won an O. Henry Award, The Pacific Northwest Book Award, and the Idaho Book Award. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, The Guardian, The New York Times, Zoetrope, One Story, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She is an Associate Professor at the University of Montana, where she teaches in the MFA program. She lives in the mountains of western Montana with her husband and their three small children. Her second book, Nightjar, is a collection of stories forthcoming from Random House in 2026.

Shakespeare & Co. is delighted to host a reading and discussion with Missoula-based author Brad Bigelow on Wednesday, January 14, 2026 at 7:00 pm. Bigelow will read from his debut book Virginia Faulkner: A Life in Two Acts (Bison Books, January 2026). This event is free and open to the public.

About Virginia Faulkner: A Life in Two Acts:
Featured writer for the Washington Post at twenty. Author of a hit novel at twenty-one. Coaxed Greta Garbo out of seclusion for a Hollywood party. Ghostwrote the memoirs of New York’s most famous madam, Polly Adler. It’s no wonder Virginia Faulkner was spoken of as the next Dorothy Parker.

But Faulkner also struggled with alcoholism and depression, lost respect for her own work as a writer, and at age forty-two returned to her hometown of Lincoln, Nebraska, unsure what her next move would be. Asked to assemble an anthology to celebrate Nebraska, she joined the University of Nebraska Press and soon found herself fascinated by the challenges of work as an editor. The press, she realized, offered her the opportunity to champion the work of the writer she respected above all others: Willa Cather. And after finding an ideal colleague and life partner in Bernice Slote, Faulkner launched a series of books that helped establish Cather as one of America’s greatest writers.

In Virginia Faulkner: A Life in Two Acts, Brad Bigelow tells Faulkner’s story—one that’s lively, irreverent, and rich in its commitment to literature of lasting importance. Though her own books have since been forgotten, Faulkner left a legacy of achievement and success in American literature against social and personal odds, and her voice and spirit shine forth in the pages of this book.

Author Biography:
Brad Bigelow is a writer, teacher, and editor living in Missoula, Montana. He is the editor of the Recovered Books series for Boiler House Press and has been writer of the Neglected Books website since 2006. With more than six hundred articles, the site celebrates the work of little-known writers like Virginia Faulkner.

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.