After the Gold Rush - Softcover

Buzbee, Lewis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1932195386 ISBN 13: 9781932195385

Publisher: Tupelo Press, 2006

Synopsis

After the Gold Rush is filled with powerful, moving stories of families tested by forces inside and out. Even when life conspires to tear them apart, the family must cope, figure out what comes next. These are stories about life at its most quotidianand most challenging level, after the gold rush of love has become the business of living. The people in these stories, like the people around you every day, discover inner resources and solutions both unique and universal.

About this title

About the Author:

A third generation Californian, and the first in his family to attend college, Buzbee has been writing since age 12 when his father died. In college, he worked in bookstores (Upstart Crow in San Jose, then eventually managing Printers Inc. in Palo Alto). In 1986, he became a sales rep for Chronicle Books in northern California. He earned his MFA from Warren Wilson College. Buzbee is the author of a novel, Fliegelman's Desire , (1990, Ballantine) and a non-fiction work, The Yellow Lighted Bookshop , (2006, Graywolf). He has been published in Harper's, Paris Review, Bloomsbury Review, The San Francisco Chronicle , and Gentleman's Quarterly , among others.

From Publishers Weekly:

Though Buzbee sketches moving portraits of disconsolate children coping variously with the loss of a parent, his stories, which are fraught with the emotional fallout of fractured families, often buckle under an overload of meaning and twists of fate. Two linked tales, "Red Weather" and "An American Son," follow Robert Macoby from his "Sputnik baby" 1950s boyhood in San Jose, Calif., to his improbable self-imposed exile and middle age repatriation. "Red Weather" turns on the poignant homecoming of Robert's retired Navy man father, Mac, but Buzbee awkwardly packs in the return of Mac's itinerant brother Nin, followed immediately by news of the death of their long-absent father. "An American Son" features Robert grown into a self-righteous writer. In 1974, Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag captures his 17-year-old imagination, and he impulsively "defects" to the U.S.S.R. ("In Russia...everyone already knew the promises were lies"), where he becomes a celebrated, state-sponsored novelist who marries his translator. She eventually leaves him for America, taking their baby boy along, and the story concludes with a futile family reunion after an 11-year separation. Buzbee includes some slight stories as well: in "Hairpin," a vague father and daughter grieve their wife and mother, who died in a car crash they survived. "Five and Dime" depicts a struggling single mother and her 9-year-old son, who find a sense of home at the titular venue. Buzbee (The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop) treats his characters with empathy, but they fumble for connection in overdetermined or underrealized worlds.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Tupelo Press
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1932195386
• ISBN 13: 9781932195385
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 92