Award-winning Montana author and professional flyfishing guide, Callan Wink will make an appearance at Off Square Books at 6 pm on Thursday, February 20, as part of the Thacker Mountain Radio Hour.
Beartooth (Spiegel & Grau; 2025) is a literary adventure novel about two survivalist brothers in desperate straits, who are lured into committing a crime in Yellowstone National Park. Thad and Hazen, long ago abandoned by their wayward mother, are drowning in medical bills and notices about back taxes. They live alone in an aging, timber house hand-built into the leeside of the Beartooth Mountains. Thad’s the older brother, responsible, a loner, the caretaker of Hazen, who is a little … different. Until recently, they made ends meet the same way their father did: by working thirteen-hour days up and down the mountain splitting firewood, selling the cords door-to-door. When a menacing figure named The Scot appears with a lucrative proposition to extract stolen artifacts out of Yellowstone, the brothers can’t refuse, despite the staggering odds and the enormous risk. Evoking the most timeless voices of American pastoral storytelling, from John Steinbeck to Cormac McCarthy, Beartooth is a bracing, profoundly moving novel about survival, revenge, and escape.
Author Callan Wink has been awarded fellowships by the National Endowment for the Arts and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. His stories and essays have been published in the New Yorker, Granta, Playboy, Men’s Journal, and The Best American Short Stories. He is the author of a novel, August, and a collection of short stories, Dog Run Moon. He lives in Livingston, Montana, where he is a fly-fishing guide on the Yellowstone River.
