One Book Billings Author - Maxim Loskutoff
may 9, 2026 at 1:00 PM - 2:00 pm
@Billings Public Library
Free
Join us for a special author event with Maxim Loskutoff, who will discuss his gripping novel Old King. A haunting story set in 1970s Montana at the fading edge of the American frontier.
In the summer of 1976, Duane Oshun finds himself stranded in a remote Montana town beset by a series of strange and menacing events. He takes a job as a logger and builds a cabin on an isolated road near a reclusive neighbor―a hermit named Ted Kaczynski.
The two men are captivated by the valley’s endangered old-growth forest, but Kaczynski’s violent grievances against modern society soon threaten the lives of all those around him. As Kaczynski’s bombs crescendo to the book’s devastating conclusion, Old King wrestles with the birth of the modern environmental movement, the accelerating dominion of technology in American life, and a new kind of violence that lives next door.
Told in four parts sweeping across two decades, Old King establishes Maxim Loskutoff as one of the most thrilling and inventive authors of the American west, a writer “endowed with fearless audacity, stunning grace, and gutsy heart” (Nickolas Butler).
Two-time winner of the High Plains Book Award, Maxim Loskutoff is the author of the novels OLD KING and RUTHIE FEAR and 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 GQ. Other honors include the Nelson Algren Award and the Montana Innovation Award. A Yaddo and MacDowell fellow, he lives in the Rocky Mountains of western Montana.
