After the Gold Rush [Perfect Paperback]

Lewis Buzbee (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 2006

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.

Editorial Reviews

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 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.

Product Details

• Perfect Paperback: 92 pages
• Publisher: Tupelo Press (May 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1932195386
• ISBN-13: 978-1932195385
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,986,455 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

To learn more, visit lewisbuzbee.com

Lewis Buzbee is a fourth generation California native. He began writing in 1972, at the upripe age of 15, after reading the first chapter of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, and unfortunately, things haven't improved since then. He sold his first two short stories in 1979 and has been published, and unpublished, since then. He's worked as, in this order, a dishwasher, a bookseller, a publisher, a caterer, a bartender, and as a teacher of writing. Since 2000, he's been on the faculty of the MFA program at the University of San Francisco. He and his wife, the poet Julie Bruck, live with their daughter Maddy in San Francisco, just half a block from Golden Gate Park. His books for adults include The Yellow Lighted Bookshop, Fliegelman's Desire, After the Gold Rush, and First to Leave Before the Sun.

His first novel for middle grade readers, Steinbeck's Ghost, was published in 2008 by Feiwel and Friends and was selected for these honors: a Smithsonian Notable Book, a Northern California Book Award Nominee, the Northern California Independent Booksellers' Association Children's Book of the Year, and the California Library Association's John and Patricia Beatty Award.

His second middle-grade novel, The Haunting of Charles Dickens, won the Northern California Book Award, was nominated for an Edgar Award, and was chosen as a Judy Lopez Memorial Award honor book.

His new middle grade novel, Bridge of Time, will be published in the spring of 2012, and a new nonfiction book, Blackboard: The Life of the Classroom, will be published in early 2013

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Subtle Prose that Spans Continents and Touches Hearts, August 8, 2006

By 

Arthur Edwards "For those about to Proust, we... (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: After the Gold Rush (Perfect Paperback)

What's not to love about this story collection? Buzbee's prose resonates in that Carver way where the protagonists never quite understand what's bugging them, but the reader knows, making the conflicts all the more compelling. A study in subtlety.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Cheever of NoCal, September 24, 2006

By 

[e-mail] "catherine" (Santa Cruz, Ca.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: After the Gold Rush (Perfect Paperback)

Cool, smoothly rendered stories involving characters with ties to NoCal whose middle class veneer hides true emotional journey. Like Cheever, the characters are rendered real on the surface, but swim in the river of their heart. Like Carver in the seamless pacing and ease with tragedy. A collection in the tradition of the great storytellers.