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.

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.

In these pages you will come to fall in love with a ruggedly diverse and strikingly beautiful state, a land that takes hold and won't let go. "Montana: High, Wide, and Handsome" is widely recognized as a classic history and delightful ode to the idiosyncratic personalities, restless landscape, unforgettable peoples, and lively history of the Treasure State. William Kittredge provides a new introduction for this edition.

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.

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

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.

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."

Montana has long drawn the outcasts and the dreamers, the searchers and the hiders--and the writers. Here are twenty-one stories from the frontier of our country and the edge of our national imagination.
The cast of characters is as big as the state. There's the cuckolded father in Richard Ford's classic, "Great Falls," or Ralph Beer's hero in "Big Spenders," sitting with his umbrella drink, dreaming about palm trees and white crescent beaches. There's also Thomas McGuane's eavesdropping narrator in "Like a Leaf," watching other people's lives, always from a distance. Chris Offutt's protagonist in "Tough People" is trying to earn enough money in amateur boxing to get out of town, while Mary Clearman Blew's narrator in "Bears and Lions" describes how her home is slipping away--how the West is leaving her behind.
Montana has for years been a special place for writers. The Best of Montana's Short Fiction is long overdue.