Bozeman Magazine

Crazy Mountain chronicles a rapidly changing place and community through the diverse and conflicting stories of the people who live in a fictional mountain valley in Montana over nearly half a century. As the rural landscape and wide-open spaces transform into subdivisions, McMansions, and resorts, conflicts escalate between locals and newcomers, developers and environmentalists, the wealthy and the homeless. Through multiple perspectives, Crazy Mountain explores a wide range of viewpoints on the changes going on in Montana and the West, giving voice to ranchers, real estate agents, carpenters, artists, indigenous activists, landscapers, movie stars, musicians, pizza delivery drivers, gun-toting fundamentalists, and others including Kate, a troubled young woman who becomes homeless over the course of the book and whose own story in many ways mirrors the destruction and resurrection of the land. These varied threads weave together into a rich tapestry of place, forming a community of voices that tell the ever-shifting story of the land.

Author Laura Pritchett, winner of multiple literary awards, says Crazy Mountain is “the real thing—complex, sophisticated stories of the American West. From subdivisions to resorts to the homeless, from wilderness to ski slopes to private land, we find an accurate, sensitive, and nuanced view of rural Montana.” High Plains Book Award winner Allen Morris Jones says, “in this artful, lyrical, deeply moving novel, Elise Atchison follows a piece of landscape through several lifetimes, capturing the dramatic complexity of the disrupted West through a full cast of characters, one lens after another.” American Book Award winner and Guggenheim Fellow Debra Magpie Earling says, “Gritty and tough and gut wrenching … Crazy Mountain ignites a firestorm.”

After the talk, Elise Atchison will be available to sign books.