Author Josh Weil in Conversation with Smith Henderson & Brett Puryear
September 18 @ 6:00pm
Country Bookshelf is excited to welcome Josh Weil, author of the new novel WHAT CAME WEST, on September 18 at 6pm. Josh will be in conversation with Montana authors Smith Henderson and Brett Puryear.
ABOUT WHAT CAME WEST
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.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Josh Weil is the author of the novels What Came West and 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.
Smith Henderson is the author of the Montana Book Award-winning novel Fourth of July Creek, the thriller Make Them Cry, and the forthcoming horror podcast The Kennel. His writing has appeared in such venues as the New York Times, Popular Mechanics, the AMC network, an Emmy-nominated Super Bowl halftime commercial, and the Best American Short Fiction Anthology. He lives where he was born—in Missoula, Montana.
Brett Puryear was born and raised around Chattanooga, Tennessee. He’s the author of the novel Nightburner, an Appalachian Literary Horror forthcoming from Minotaur Books in 2027. His short fiction and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Southwest Review, the Iowa Review, CutBank, the Writer’s Foundry Review, and elsewhere. He’s a regular contributor at Wildsam, where he writes on road travel, fly fishing, and the natural world. He lives in Missoula, Montana, with his family.
