Josh Weil (What Came West) Author Talk and Signing

Description

Bank Square Books presents an author talk and signing with Josh Weil for his book, What Came West. Josh will be in conversation with Stuart Vyse.

About the Book

A gripping tale of murder and pursuit set against the shifting Sierra Nevada during the Gold Rush, where ambition, violence, and destiny collide.

“What Came West is astonishing. Unraveling the mythology of the Western with a genius for insight and description, Weil tells the story anew: a beautiful, ruminative, bloody, terrifying and brilliant book about a chapter in the life of one man and in the life of our country. Unmissable.” —Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less

Sierra Nevada, 1840s, just before the Gold Rush ignites. Silas Hall has never belonged anywhere except the wild. Bullied as a child and uneasy even within his own family, he finds brief solace in love and fatherhood before the pull of the frontier overwhelms him. One day he heads west, chasing a life that might finally make sense.

What follows is a swift, pulse-pounding journey into the mountains, where Silas becomes one of the first white settlers to cross into the Sierra Nevada. He forges a precarious peace with the Indigenous people who live there—until the Gold Rush crashes in with violent force. As thousands flood the region, the balance shatters, and Silas commits murder, a desperate act that alters the course of every life around him, including his own.

Taut and propulsive, What Came West is told in two parallel voices—one a tense, third-person account of Silas on the run, and the other a confessional letter from Silas to the son he left behind—and confronts many different forms of American inheritance, in all its danger, emotional voltage, and mythic momentum. Weil’s masterpiece is a fierce, heart-driven portrait of an outsider racing toward belonging and barreling headlong into consequence.

About the Author

Josh Weil is the author of the novel The Great Glass Sea, the novella collection The New Valley, and the story collection The Age of Perpetual Light. He is a Fulbright fellow and has been awarded the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a “5 Under 35” award from the National Book Foundation, the California Book Award, and a Pushcart Prize. For the past dozen years, he has called the Sierra Nevada of Northern California home.

About Stuart Vyse

Stuart Vyse is a behavioral scientist, teacher, and writer. He is a contributing editor for Skeptical Inquirer magazine, for which he writes the “Behavior & Belief” column, both online and in print. He has written personal and professional essays in a variety of places, including the Observer, Medium, The Atlantic, The Good Men Project, Tablet, and Time.