Why does a particular landscape move us? What is it that attaches us to a particular place? Tall's From Where We Stand is an eloquent exploration of the connections we have with places-and the loss to us if there are no such connections. A typically rootless child of several American suburbs, Tall set out to make a true home for herself in the landscape that circumstance had brought her-the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. In a mosaic of personal anecdotes, historical sketches, and lyrical meditations, she interweaves her own story with the story of this place and its people-from the Seneca Nation of the Iroquois, to European settlers, to the many utopians who sensed and were inspired by a spiritual resonance here. This edition includes an introduction by William Kittredge and a foreword by Stephen Kuusisto, both highlighting the book's significance and Tall's exquisite skill in tracing the relationship between homelands and storytelling.

This book is an anthology of some of the greatest stories and storytellers of the American West. Through eight chapters and over 800 pages, 150 writers present scores of myths, stories, poems, essays, and journals that document Montana's significant literary tradition. The selections range from pre-white Indian days to the present, and, taken as a whole, they offer a powerful microcosm of the entire western experience. The chapters, each prefaced by an original essay, progress chronologically from myths and tales of the Indian people to accounts of exploration and the fur trade, followed by the mining and stockmen's frontiers, the agricultural and small town experience, as well as a special chapter on Butte--the richest hill on earth. Contemporary chapters take up the emergence of the modern West in the middle years of the twentieth century as well as the renaissance of western literature in contemporary fiction and poetry. These chapters include many authors who have earned national reputations in fiction, poetry, and criticism, but they also include many younger writers whose careers are just beginning.

After numerous essays, short stories and the heralded memoir "A Hole in the Sky," William Kittredge gives us a debut novel that ratifies his standing as a leading writer of the American West.
Rossie Benasco's horseback existence begins at age 15 and culminates in a thousand-mile drive of more than 200 head of horses through the Rockies into Calgary. It's a journey that leads him, ultimately, to Eliza Stevenson and a passion so powerful, his previously unfocused life gains clarity and purpose. From the settlers, cowboys, and gamblers who opened up this country to the landholders and politicians who ran it, this is an epic tale of love and wide open spaces that stretches over the grand canvas of the twentieth-century West.

The Nature of Generosity is at once a natural sequel to the acclaimed memoir Hole in the Sky and an entirely unique masterwork from one of the finest writers of the American West.

Taking as his topic the "ordinary yearning to take physical and emotional care," William Kittredge embarks upon a literary and philosophical grand tour that explores the very core of who we are. Whether he's recalling a childhood in Oregon, touring Europe, or studying photographs of Japanese gardens in a bookstore in New York City, Kittredge's connections are as unexpected as they are inspiring. Shattering the myth that survival of the fittest means "survival of the violent, or the cruelest, or the selfish," Kittredge imagines a world in which altruism dominates--and offers ample evidence that this is not an unreachable utopian ideal.

The American West is as varied in its inhabitants as in its landforms. Yet what has come to stand for "Western" writing is the myth of the wagon train and the lone gunman. In the Portable Wester Reader, William Kittredge has assembled stories, poems, essays, and excerpts that transcend the Western myth and explore the vast range of Western experience. With selections from more than seventy authors, and an introduction and headnotes by William Kittredge. The Portable Western Reader redefines the Western literary landscape.

Who owns the West? "All of us, of course", says William Kittredge, but this "simple answer... is sort of beside the point when we get down to considering questions of fairness. Stay joyous under the sun and moon, in the rain and out; that's another halfway answer". Kittredge gives us not easy answers but a sustained meditation on what it means to be a Westerner today. The three essays in Who Owns the West? compose both a celebration of the new West and an elegy for an old West that is fading. Noting that "our ideas of paradise originate in childhood", Kittredge describes, in "Heaven on Earth", growing up in the highland desert country of east Oregon, "an ancient horseback world that is mostly gone". Next, in "Lost Cowboys and Other Westerners", he gives us a series of portraits of inhabitants of the region. Finally, in "Departures", Kittredge turns his eye to the West today, the "new heartland nation" that is being born from the pain and the glory of the past and the struggles and anger of the present.

With a foreword by William Kittredge and line drawings by Ursula K. LeGuin, this literary anthology gathers together personal impressions of the Malheur-Steens region of Oregon, known for its birding opportunities, its natural beauty and remoteness, and, more recently, for the 2016 armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. Contributors include biologists, students, tourists, birders, local residents, and native Paiute, thus reflecting the perspectives of visitors, original inhabitants, and current residents. Anyone who has visited the area or plans to do so, and anyone with an interest in the region, will find inspiration in this literary companion.

At a difficult and sad time in his family life, A. B. Guthrie, Jr., turned for surcease to reading western and whodunit novels. In his autobiography, "The Blue Hen's Chick" (also a Bison Book), he touches on that moment when he realized he could write as well as or better than the published plot-spinners. "What about a mystery and cow-country myth in combination?" he mused, "So far as I could recall, the two had never been blended. All right. I'd blend them."

The result was his first novel, "Murders at Moon Dance," appearing in 1943. It was an audacious debut with bold characterizations and a sharply etched, atmospheric setting The dusty town of Moon Dance, smacked down between barren mountains and a badland named the Freezeout, would also be a back-drop for "The Big It and Other Stories" (1960). In Guthrie's hand, raw vitality replaces the woodenness of much writing in the genre, and unexpected grace notes in the verbal rhythms suggest the author of "The Big Sky" (1947) and the Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Way West" (1949).

Richard Hugo was, in James Wright's words, "a great poet, true to our difficult life." Making Certain It Goes On brings together, as Hugo wished, the poems published in book form during his lifetime, together with the new poems he wrote in his last years. It is the definitive collection of a major American poet's enduring work.

"The poetry of Richard Hugo is one of the most profound and moving documents that our period of American literature has produced. Hugo's uncompromising imagination, his powerful concern with the world of nature and of people, combined with his absolute dedication to the craft of poetry, result in writing which, at its best, lifts us into a realm where everything is of consequence, which we always knew it was, and never found the means to say it."—James Dickey

"His collected poems show Hugo turning toward a calm peace that would mark his best work. . . . If we had not noticed before that his great gift was the elegy, we see it now. . . . Richard Hugo died in 1982. He did not doubt that his work would go on. It will."—Dave Smith, New York Times Book Review

After a lifetime spent writing and working on his family's cattle ranch outside of Helena, Montana, Ralph Beer has gathered his best magazine essays into one collection called "In These Hills," In thirty-three essays he provides a moving and elegiac tribute to lives now passed, an often humorous homage to the provincial, and an attempt "to fathom the place where we live . . . to decipher who we are," as he writes in his introduction. Beer, praised as one of the finest writers in the West, offers an authentic literary voice paired with a lifetime spent exploring a particularly beloved piece of land. From his first experience with a wheat harvest, to the winter rebuilding of a 1947 Dodge Power Wagon, to his moving exploration of an old family mystery, these essays slice sharply under the sod of our embedded romanticism, exploring not only the brute hardships of a living made from cattle ranching but the inextricable satisfaction of it as well. As Beer himself says in the final pages of this collection, "Stories outshine instruments of gold. Stories outlast stone."

There's no denying [Hartman's] abilities as a photographer. Shape, color, and light, he has an impeccable eye for composition, for juxtaposing line against line, drawing the viewer's eye into his subject...In North Dakota, he likes a flood-drenched plain in orange twilight, one stretch of barbed wire fence in a strong horizontal, another triangulating stretch (just the fence posts visible above the water) disappearing into the distance. In South Dakota, he gives us a flat plain with alternating gold, green, and brown strips of field, a dark storm building overhead...Accompanying the first third of Hartman's photos is a new essay by William Kittredge (always an occasion)...There is no one more authoritatively positioned to comment on the West than Kittredge, nor anyone who can write about it half as well' - NewWest.net. 'Tells the story of the region in textures of flaking paint and rust juxtaposed against stunning sunsets and big skies. Intense color photographs narrate the 1500-mile, often-inhospitable route from Texas to Canada' - Texas Parks & Wildlife. 'A lavish and glorious new coffee-table book ...Hartman has a gifted eye for both the natural and man-made vistas that he encounters, and his color images are breathtaking. Beginning in North Dakota and working south, Hartman presents pictures that are themselves eloquent essays in rural and small-town spaces. An aura of loneliness and abandonment clings to many of these shots. It's no secret that people have been fleeing the harsh physical and economic realities of the Great Plains for years, and these pictures document that fact. Unpainted farm houses and rickety windmills hold silent vigil amid awesome expanses of earth and sky, weeds grow through a Nebraska sidewalk, and an old truck rusts into the Oklahoma soil...A testament to the alluring visual appeal of this country's great middle' - Mobile Register. Resulting from an arduous series of six journeys along the two-thousand-mile line that divides East from West, Monte Hartmans perceptive photographs provide the intimate yet dispassionate observations of a person who chose to explore the meanings inherent in the great empty middle between our coasts. These images inspired William Kittredge to travel the Meridian himself. His essay, an unblinking yet sensitive musing on what once was and what now remains, offers a poignant counterpoint to Hartmans visual tapestry. 'This slice of North America requires stamina unimaginable to the rest of us, and is populated by enduring people who've lost all patience with strangers when their efforts to convey their attachment to this place have fallen on deaf ears. It is not easy to know why a land so lonesome, so often melancholy, parts of which have never surpassed frontier density, will go on having such meaning to those who choose to stay. Hartman and Kittredge, discerning souls, have caught their attachment' - Thomas McGuane, author of The Cadence of Grass. '""Americas100th Meridian"" exposes our nations heartland in its beauty and desolation land as open and mysterious as the palm of Gods hand' - Annick Smith, co-producer of ""A River Runs Through It"". 'A breathtaking reminder of the beauty concentrated in that narrow slice of the continent' - ""North Dakota Quarterly"". 'An astounding coffee-table book tour ...A truly splendid and pristine memory, capturing timeless moments and locations' - ""Wisconsin Bookwatch"". 'A testament to the alluring visual appeal of this country's great middle' - ""Mobile Press-Register"". Monte Hartman has an M.A. in art from UCLA and forty years of experience in photography, design, and the arts. He lives with his wife in Hayward, California. William Kittredge, one of America's great Western writers, has authored many books, including ""Hole in the Sky"" and ""Who Owns the West?"".

William Kittredge's stunning memoir is at once autobiography, a family chronicle, and a Westerner's settling of accounts with the land he grew up in. This is the story of a grandfather whose single-minded hunger for property won him a ranch the size of Delaware but estranged him from his family; of a father who farmed with tractors and drainage ditches but consorted with movie stars; and of Kittredge himself, who was raised by cowboys and saw them become obsolete, who floundered through three marriages, hard drinking, and madness before becoming a writer. Host hauntingly, Hole in the Sky is an honest reckoning of the American myth that drove generations of Americans westward -- and what became of their dream after they reached the edge.

In her first book of poetry since 1993's groundbreaking The Book of Medicines, Linda Hogan locates the intimate connections between all living things and uncovers the layers that both protect and disguise our affinities. like the tree I can lose myself layer after layer all the way down to infinity and that's when the world has eyes and sees. The whole world loves the unlayered human. Hogan's wisdom, gleaned from a lifelong commitment to caring for wildlife and the environment, has been deepened by the hard-won, humbling revelations of illness. With soaring imagery, clear lyrics, and entrancing rhythm, her poetry becomes a visionary instrument singing to and for humanity. From the microscopic creatures of the sea to the powerful beauty of horses, from the beating heart of her unborn grandson to the vast, uncovered expanses of the universe, Hogan reminds us that, "Between the human and all the rest / lies only an eyelid." A Chickasaw poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, teacher, and activist, Linda Hogan has spent most of her life in Oklahoma and Colorado. A volunteer and consultant for wildlife rehabilitation and endangered species programs, Hogan has published essays for the Nature Conservancy and the Sierra Club, and her books have received numerous awards, including nominations from the Pulitzer Prize Board and National Book Critics Circle.