The summer Aldous Bohm turns nine, his parents move to the woods near Snoqualmie ,Washington , "to reinvent the American family." The Bohm's are working class hippies in post-Vietnam America . Their makeshift pastoral takes shape in a haze of pot smoke and good intentions and ultimately births a vortex of personal insecurity and romanticism taking the family deeper into the woods to destroy them. Aldous oversees these tragedies, recalled a decade later, after he has left Snoqualmie to join the military in the buildup to the first Gulf War. Sweeping in scope yet unerringly precise in its detail, Shoot the Buffalo conjoins the dead end narrative of American masculinity with its stubborn twin - the Romantic ideal of nature - to suggest an ambivalent way forward, a path out of these woods.
Matt Briggs grew up in the Snoqualmie Valley, raised by working-class, counter-culture parents who cultivated and sold cannabis. Briggs has written two books set in rural Washington chronicling this life, The Remains of River Names and Shoot the Buffalo. Critic Ann Powers wrote of Briggs first book in the New York Times Book Review, "Briggs has captured the America that neither progressives nor family-value advocates want to think about, where bohemianism has degenerated into dangerous dropping out." Briggs has published a number of collection of stories, including The Moss Gatherers and The End is the Beginning. Of his stories, Jim Feast wrote in the American Book Review, "All of Briggs's zigzagging stories are told with great attention to the details of lowbrow culture and the contours of the American Northwest.
Briggs has won a number of prizes. His novel, Shoot the Buffalo, was award an American Book Award by the Before Columbus Foundation in 2006. He has also won The King County Arts Commission Publication Prizer, the Nelson Bentley Prize in Fiction, and the Hugo Gift Award from Richard Hugo House. The Stranger awarded Briggs the first Stranger Genius Award in Literature in 2003.
