Josh Weil

READING & BOOK SIGNING

Josh Weil

Wheatgrass Books will host Josh Weil, author of What Came West, for a reading & book signing on Thursday, September 17th from 6 pm to 8 pm.

True Grit meets The Revenant meets Lonesome Dove in WHAT CAME WEST (Doubleday; on sale June 2, 2026), the new novel from award-winning writer Josh Weil, 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.

Unfolding over the first half of the 19th century, across an America relentlessly reshaped by its exploding population, WHAT CAME WEST is the story of a world as yet unaltered by that onrush of whites—the Sierra Nevada of the 1840s, before the discovery of gold—and a man, white himself but fleeing his own kind, who finds in that wilderness a refuge, only to see it violently ripped away and, in his desperation, violently attempt to save it.

Since childhood, Silas Hall had been painfully sensitive to the proximity of people, their sounds, smells, simply their presence enough to set him shaking, send him into fits. Only with animals does he feel at ease; only the whispers of grass and leaves can soothe him. It is an affliction that leaves him friendless, a disorder that one night will drive him to abandon wife and son and set him fleeing on a years-long journey ever farther west. Until at last—in the solitude of the Sierras, shunned by the Nisenan already there, living merely as a human animal among non-human ones—he finds a kind of peace. For a few years. Before the Gold Rush shatters it. Shatters him. Leads him to commit an act of such violence it will bring upon the world he loves the wrath of the one he fled.

Told in two intricately woven parts—a third-person account of the manhunt that violence sets in motion intercut with an epistolary narrative Silas writes to his lost son—WHAT CAME WEST is a stunning, unflinching exploration of American myth and memory, the lure of wilderness, and the dark pull of greed; a harrowing reckoning with westward expansion and the broken promises of Manifest Destiny; and an indictment of the Gold Rush’s brutal legacy of environmental destruction and violence against indigenous people.

Long considered a writer’s writer, Josh Weil is the author of the novel The Great Glass Sea, the novella collection The New Valley, and the story collection . 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 National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 award, the California Book
Award, and a Pushcart Prize. For the past dozen years, he has called the Sierra Nevada of Northern California home.

An avid outdoorsman, he has traversed much of the terrain in What Came West, swam in the lakes high in the Sierra Buttes, scrambled in the Grouse Ridge region, and white water rafted down the South Yuba River, and explored remote Appalachia, Egypt’s Western Desert, Romania’s Carpathian mountains, Slovakia’s Tatras, the Karelian lakes region of northern Russia, Uganda’s Rwenzori Mountains, and the Mongolian Steppe—all with nothing more than a pack and a one-man tent.

A visual artist and lithographer, he spent six months completing the twenty intricate dip-pen illustrations throughout What Came West.