Elk River Books

Doug Peacock reading: Climate Change in the Pleistocene

By Elk River Books on May 18, 2013

Elk River Books welcomes author and naturalist Doug Peacock who will read excerpts from his new book, In the Shadow of the Sabertooth: A Renegade Naturalist Considers Global Warming, the First Americans and the Terrible Beasts of the Pleistocene at 7 p.m. on Thursday, June 6.

Peacock’s latest book explores the human experience in North America during the last great period of global warming—13,000-15,000 years ago—as a parable for our modern crisis, from the death of ancient megafauna to the disappearance of the world’s ice today. It’s a deeply personal odyssey that follows Peacock from archeological digs in Michigan and Montana, to the tiger haunted forests of Siberia, along the wild coast of the Pacific Northwest, into the rugged arroyos of Mexico and the American Southwest.

Doug Peacock is infamous as the model for Edward Abbey’s monkey-wrenching hero, George Washington Hayduke. But he’s also an acclaimed author whose books include Grizzly Years, Walking It Off, ¡Baja! and The Essential Grizzly (co-authored with Andrea Peacock). He’s a renowned grizzly bear expert and has published widely on wilderness issues.

A disabled Vietnam veteran and former Green Beret medic, Peacock was the subject of the award winning feature film, Peacock’s War, and has appeared on television programs including Good Morning America, The Today Show, the NBC Evening News, Sesame Street, the American Sportsman and Democracy Now.

David Quammen calls Peacock “an iconic figure, a secular prophet in the wildass American West. His voice is important, angry, humane and unique.” Fellow veteran and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Phil Caputo adds, “Peacock is a direct literary descendant of Thoreau, with a few genes from Audubon and his mentor, Edward Abbey… His response to the natural world is visceral, intellectual and spiritual at the same time.”

The venue for Doug Peacock’s reading will be announced soon. The event is free and will be followed by a signing.

Posted in Events | Tagged Climate Change, Doug Peacock, Hayduke, In the Shadow of the Sabertooth | 1 Response

Celebrating Bloomsday with ‘Nighttown Suidae’ performance

By Elk River Books on May 18, 2013

Bret Kinslow prepares for the role of Stephen Dedalus in Nighttown Suidae, based on an excerpt of James Joyce's Ulysses.

James Joyce fans the world over mark each June 16 as “Bloomsday,” honoring the day the groundbreaking novel Ulysses takes place, chronicling the Dublin-wide odyssey of its central character, Leopold Bloom. Livingston’s Elk River Books joins the celebration with a performance of live theatre and music at the Livingston Bar & Grille, 130 N. Main, on Sunday, June 16, at 7 p.m. Admission is free.

The evening begins with a performance of a completely revised, more-rollicking version of Nighttown Suidae, Marc Beaudin’s adaption from the novel. The comedic play comes from the “Circe” episode of Ulysses, where Bloom follows Stephen Dedalus and his drinking companion, Lynch, to Dublin’s red light district. It’s a hallucinatory, hilarious, and surreal revelry of poetic language and wild imagery. The reading runs roughly 40 minutes and contains adult language and sexual references.

“Last year’s debut was such a hit,” says Beaudin, “we’ve decided to make it an annual tradition, this time with audience participation. Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness, highly imaginary writing includes dialogue spoken by everything from a bar of soap to the springs of a prostitute’s bed: these are a couple of the roles that will be performed by the audience.

“We hope to see this growing into a sort of Rocky Horror for the literary-minded.”

The play will be followed with a concert by Livingston’s Fenian Brew, performing Irish music from the traditional to The Pogues and beyond.

Elk River Books frequently presents readings, book signings and other literary events, and carries a curated collection of used books, new books by regional writers (with many signed editions), as well as a selection of cards by local artists and fair trade gifts. The store is located at 115 E. Callender St. in downtown Livingston, and can be found online at elkriverbooks.com. For more information, call 224-5802.

Posted in Events | Tagged Bloomsday, James Joyce, Marc Beaudin, Nighttown Suidae, Ulysses | Leave a response

An Evening with Terry Tempest Williams

By Elk River Books on May 18, 2013

Photo by Marion Ettlinger

Elk River Books is honored to celebrate its second birthday with a lecture by author and naturalist Terry Tempest Williams at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, June 18, in the ballroom of the Shane Lalani Center for the Arts, 415 E. Lewis St. in Livingston.

A fierce advocate for social justice and the natural world, Tempest is known for her lyrical and impassioned prose. Her breakthrough book, Refuge, documented her mother’s death from breast cancer juxtaposed against the flooding of the Bear River bird refuge, in the context of fallout from nuclear testing in her native Utah. Tempest takes her spirituality, grounded in Mormonism, to universal levels, in a search for transcendence in the ashes of genocide and slaughter (Finding Beauty in a Broken World), strength from imagination (The Open Space of Democracy), passion in a scorched landscape (Red), and the convergence of flesh and soul (Leap). In her latest book, When Women Were Birds, Williams tackles the mystery of her late mother’s journals, shelf after shelf of blank pages she turns into a meditation on voice.

Williams is both a Guggenheim and Lannan fellow, recipient of the Wallace Stegner Award, the Wilderness Society’s prestigious Robert Marshall Award, and Distinguished Achievement Award from the Western American Literature Association. She was also recipient of the Community of Christ International Peace Award “in recognition of significant peacemaking vision, advocacy and action,” as well as the David R. Brower Conservation Award for activism.

She will be introduced by her long-time friend, author Doug Peacock, who calls Williams “the most important moral voice of her generation.”

Tickets for the event are $50, and include a book signing and reception with the author following her lecture. A portion of the proceeds will go to benefit Elk River Arts & Lectures, a new nonprofit dedicated to bringing writers and artists to Livingston.

Tickets are on sale now. Please visit Elk River Books to purchase, order over the phone with a credit card or order online via PayPal. There’s a $1 service fee per ticket for phone and PayPal orders (you will receive e-mail confirmation and your tickets will be held at the “will call” window).

For more information, call 224-5802.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Doug Peacock, Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds | Leave a response

Reading: The poetry of William Pitt Root and Pamela Uschuk

By Elk River Books on May 18, 2013

Elk River Books will host a reading by internationally-acclaimed poets William Pitt Root and Pamela Uschuk at the bookstore, 115 E. Callender St. in Livingston, on Thursday, June 27, at 7 p.m.

The Tucson poet laureate from 1997 through 2002, Root’s work has been widely published and honored. The Poetry Foundation describes Root as “[i]nfluenced by Langston Hughes and Wendell Berry, Root composes expansive, musical free-verse poems that are nonetheless politically engaged.” A Stegner, Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellow, Root counts among his honors three Pushcarts and a Guy Owen prize. His books include the 2006 White Boots: New and Selected Poems of the West, the PEN West Poetry Award finalist Trace Elements from a Recurring Kingdom: The First Five Books, and The Storm and Other Poems. He is currently poetry editor of the Cutthroat literary journal, where his wife Pamela Usckuk is editor.

A University of Montana alumnus, Pamela Uschuk’s poems have been published in more than a dozen languages and 300 journals worldwide. She’s taught across the country, from a men’s maximum security prison in New York to the Indian reservations of the West, and been a featured writer all over the world, from India to Israel, Sweden to Italy. Her literary honors are too numerous to list, but include the War Poetry Prize and the Dorothy Daniels Writing Award from the National League of American PEN Women. The Bloomsbury Review calls Uschuk “one of the most insightful and spirited poets today.” Among her many books are the award-winning Finding Peaches in the Desert and Crazy Love, winner of the 2010 American Book Award.

Root and Uschuk currently split their time between Durango, Colorado, and Tucson, Arizona, where Uschuk has been undergoing chemotherapy for cancer (the topic of her most recent work).

The event is co-sponsored by Elk River Arts & Lectures, a new nonprofit dedicated to bringing in authors from across the country to read for Livingston audiences. The reading is free and will be followed by a reception and signing.

Posted in Events | Tagged Crazy Love, Pamela Uschuk, Poetry, White Boots, William Pitt Root | Leave a response

Signing: Craig Johnson’s Longmire rides again

By Elk River Books on May 18, 2013

Author Craig Johnson will stop by Elk River Books, 115 E. Callender St., to sign copies of his new book, A Serpent’s Tooth, over the lunch hour on Monday, July 8.

Johnson, who lives in Ucross, Wyoming (pop. 25), has set his series featuring the laconic sheriff Walt Longmire in Absaroka County, where reservation life and landscape are as vital characters as the well-crafted two-leggeds. Johnson once described Longmire to the New York Times as a “the sadder-but-wiser” hero: “The guys who are 6 feet 2 inches of twisted steel and sex appeal — every woman wants him, every man fears him — that’s not him.” Mr. Johnson’s books have been turned into a popular TV series on the A&E channel called Longmire, now in its second season. In 2012, Longmire garnered more viewers than any other new series in the network’s history.

In Johnson’s latest book, Walt Longmire and crew find themselves confronting a Mormon sect when a young man is tossed out of the community for being rebellious. With the boy locked up in the Absaroka County jailhouse for his own protection, the sheriff’s department searches for his mother in a “high plains scavenger hunt that ends at the doorstep of an interstate polygamy group,” run by the boy’s 400-pound father (“frighteningly well-armed and very good at keeping secrets.”) Add in a bodyguard in the form of “a delusional but dangerously spry old man who claims to be the now two-hundred-year-old Orrin Porter Rockwell, Man of God, Son of Thunder, blessed by Joseph Smith himself,” along with whispers of CIA and Big Oil involvement, and you’ve got classic Craig Johnson.

Two of Johnson’s books, The Cold Dish and The Dark Horse, were Dilys Award finalists, and Death Without Company was named the Wyoming Historical Association’s Book of the Year. Another Man’s Moccasins received the Western Writer’s of America Spur Award for best novel of 2008 as well as the Mountains and Plains Award for fiction book of the year.

The event is free, begins at noon, and will last until Mr. Johnson gets bored or we run out of books. For more information, call 224-5802.

Posted in Events | Tagged A Serpent's Tooth, Craig Johnson, Longmire | Leave a response

Reading: Carl Hiaasen’s Bad Monkey

By Elk River Books on May 18, 2013

Elk River Books will host a reading by best-selling Florida author, fisherman extraordinaire and part-time Livingston resident Carl Hiaasen at 7 p.m. on Saturday, July 13 in the Park High School RecPlex in Livingston.

A columnist for the Miami Herald, Hiaasen has earned national acclaim for his satirical novels, “wickedly funny, fiercely pointed tales in which the greedy, the corrupt, and the degraders of pristine land in Florida… get their comeuppance in mordantly ingenious, diabolically entertaining fashion.” His new book, Bad Monkey, follows in that mold, taking the action from Miami to the Keys to the Bahamas with a cast of characters that includes a voodoo witch, kinky medical examiner, disarticulated arm, and the eponymous Bad Monkey.

Hiaasen has written 15 novels (including three thrillers co-authored with his friend, the late journalist William Montalbano), four works of nonfiction, and four books for kids. For his journalism, he’s won the Damon Runyon Award from the Denver Press Club, and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. He’s written for magazines ranging from Sports Illustrated, Time and Life, to Playboy and Gourmet. Two of his books, Hoot (which won a Newberry Honor) and Strip Tease, have been made into movies.

The London Observer has called Hiaasen “America’s finest satirical novelist,” while Janet Maslin of The New York Times has compared him to Woody Allen, S.J. Perelman and Preston Sturges.

Seating is limited, so admission to Mr. Hiaasen’s reading will require a ticket, available for free from Elk River Books, 115 E. Callender St. in Livingston, beginning on Monday, June 24 (limit four per person). Doors will open at 6:30, and a book signing will follow the reading. Elk River Books will have copies of Bad Monkey and Chomp for sale. For more information, call 406-224-5802.

Posted in Events | Tagged Bad Monkey, Carl Hiaasen, Chomp, Miami Herald | Leave a response

Reading: John Taliaferro’s All the Great Prizes

By Elk River Books on May 18, 2013

Biographer and historian John Taliaferro will read from his latest book, All the Great Prizes: The Life of John Hay, from Lincoln to Roosevelt, at Elk River Books on Thursday, July 18, at 7 p.m.

A former senior editor at Newsweek, Taliaferro has previously tackled such topics as the construction of Mount Rushmore (Great White Fathers), the life of Charlie Russell (Charles M. Russell: The Life and Legend of America’s Cowboy Artist), and the 1898 reindeer rescue mission of whalers trapped in the winter ice off Alaska’s northern coast (In a Far Country).

In All the Great Prizes, Taliaferro reconstructs the life of a man who was behind the scenes of many crucial events in early American history—“from the birth of the Republican Party, the Civil War, and the Spanish-American War, to the prelude to the First World War. Much of what we know about Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt comes to us through the observations Hay made while private secretary to one and secretary of state to the other.

“Hay’s friends are a who’s who of the era: Mark Twain, Horace Greeley, Henry Adams, Henry James, and virtually every president, sovereign, author, artist, power broker, and robber baron of the Gilded Age. As an ambassador and statesman, he guided many of the country’s major diplomatic initiatives at the turn of the twentieth century: the Open Door with China, the creation of the Panama Canal, the establishment of America as a world leader.”

Douglas Brinkley praises Taliaferro’s new book saying, “John Hay is one of the seminal statesmen in American history. All the Great Prizes is the grand book he so richly deserves.”

Taliaferro is married to artist Malou Flato, and splits his time between Austin, Texas, and Pray, Montana. His reading is free, open to the public, and will be followed by a reception. For more information, call (406) 224-5802.