Maxim Loskutoff

Maxim Loskutoff is the author of the story collection Come West and See. His stories and essays have appeared in numerous periodicals, including the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Ploughshares, and the Southern Review. Ruthie Fear (W. W. Norton & Company), the first novel from Maxim Loskutoff, captures the destruction and rebirth of the modern American West with warmth, urgency, and grandeur. Raised in a trailer in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley by her stubborn, bowhunting father, our heroine, Ruthie develops a powerful connection with the natural world but struggles to find her place in a society shaped by men. Development, gun violence, and her father’s vendettas threaten her mountain home. As she comes of age, her small community begins to fracture in the face of class tension and encroaching natural disaster. The Technicolor bursts of action that test Ruthie’s commitment to the valley and its people invite us to look closer at our nation’s complicated legacy of manifest destiny, mass shootings, and environmental destruction.  Pam Houston, author of Cowboys Are My Weakness, noted that Loskutoff “writes the various violences of the contemporary American West (development, extraction, racism, misogyny, and guns, guns, guns) unapologetically, unromantically, and with a razor-sharp clarity that’s like a punch to the gut.”