{"id":159223,"date":"2026-05-21T12:01:34","date_gmt":"2026-05-21T17:01:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/?p=159223"},"modified":"2026-05-21T12:22:39","modified_gmt":"2026-05-21T17:22:39","slug":"square-books-presents-josh-weil-for-what-came-west","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/square-books-presents-josh-weil-for-what-came-west\/","title":{"rendered":"Square Books Presents Josh Weil for What Came West"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Wednesday, June 3 at 5:30 pm @ Off Square Books<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Welcome Josh Weil for What Came West<\/em>, a sweeping, emotionally charged historical adventure with the pulse of a thriller set at the cusp of the Gold Rush in the Sierra Nevada of Northern California.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201c<\/em>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.\u201d \u2014Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of <\/em>Less<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2014until 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Taut and propulsive, What Came West<\/strong> <\/em>is told in two parallel voices\u2014one a tense, third-person account of Silas on the run, and the other a confessional letter from Silas to the son he left behind\u2014and confronts many different forms of American inheritance, in all its danger, emotional voltage, and mythic momentum. Weil\u2019s masterpiece is a fierce, heart-driven portrait of an outsider racing toward belonging and barreling headlong into consequence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Josh Weil is the author of the novel The Great Glass Sea<\/strong><\/em>, the novella collection The New Valley<\/em>, and the story collection The Age of Perpetual Light<\/strong><\/em>. He is a Fulbright fellow and has been awarded the Dayton Literary Peace Prize<\/strong>, the Sue Kaufman Prize<\/strong> for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a \u201c5 Under 35\u201d award from the National Book Foundation<\/strong>, the California Book Award<\/strong>, and a Pushcart Prize. For the past dozen years, he has called the Sierra Nevada of Northern California home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Wednesday, June 3 at 5:30 pm @ Off Square Books Welcome Josh Weil for What Came West, a<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":238,"featured_media":159225,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[19],"tags":[34777,34775,20722,11900,34774,34772],"class_list":["post-159223","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local-news","tag-california-book-award","tag-dayton-literary-peace-prize","tag-national-book-foundation","tag-pushcart-prize","tag-the-age-of-perpetual-light-2","tag-the-great-glass-sea"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/060326-josh-weil-what-came-west.png?fit=295%2C295&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159223","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/238"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=159223"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159223\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":159230,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159223\/revisions\/159230"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/159225"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=159223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=159223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=159223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}