# Event Details - **Event Name**: Reading & Conversation: Josh Weil with Alan Heathcock - **Event Start and End Date**: Sun, 20 Sep, 2026 at 07:00 pm – Sun, 20 Sep, 2026 at 09:00 pm (-06:00) - **Event Description**: Meet and listen to the author of the much anticipated new novel, WHAT CAME WEST — where True Grit meets The Revenant meets Lonesome Dove.About this EventOne of the Most Anticipated Books of 2026 at Lit Hub, Alta Journal, and Cowboys & Indians“Gripping, adventurous. . . Evokes the horrors of rapacious American expansion. . . Odysseus-like. . . There are ample shootouts and knife fights, a surreal violence akin to graphic scenes in novels by Robert Coover, Larry McMurtry and Cormac McCarthy. . . [What Came West] reflects a divided self, a country divided on the cusp of a cataclysmic civil war. . . In our 250th anniversary year, [Weil] steers clear of grandiose pronouncements, allowing Silas’s singular imagination to carry the larger epic. . . [revealing] a nation cobbled together by wonder and woe.”—Hamilton Cain, The New York Times Book ReviewAbout WHAT CAME WESTWHAT CAME WEST is 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.Featured AuthorJosh Weil is the author of the novel The Great Glass Sea, the novella collection The New Valley, and the story collection The Age of Perpetual Light. 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.HostAlan Heathcock has won a Whiting Award, the GLCA New Writers Award, a National Magazine Award, has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Lannan Foundation, and the Idaho Commission on the Arts. His story collection, VOLT, was a ‘Best Book of the Year’ selection from numerous newspapers and magazines, including GQ, Publishers Weekly, Salon, and the Chicago Tribune, was named as a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and a finalist for the Barnes and Noble Discover Prize. He's also a lovely friend of the Lit Room, and frequent visitor at Oldspeak. - **Event URL**: https://allevents.in/garden-city/reading-and-conversation-josh-weil-with-alan-heathcock/100001999411925893 - **Event Categories**: fitness, Art, literary-art, trips-adventures - **Interested Audience**: - total_interested_count: 0 ## Ticket Details - **Ticket Price Range**: min: 7.18, max: 30.65, currency: USD ## Event venue details - **city**: Garden City - **state**: ID - **country**: United States - **location**: Oldspeak - **lat**: 43.62466 - **long**: -116.2417762 - **full address**: Oldspeak, 3640 West Chinden Boulevard, Garden City, United States ## Event gallery - **Alt text**: Reading & Conversation: Josh Weil with Alan Heathcock - **Image URL**: https://cdn-az.allevents.in/events1/banners/751cca822c1d492f4b247ea44033946b4d6cd91aea51c2d601411233cda6dd4d-rimg-w1200-h600-dc181818-gmir.jpg?v=1788336069 ## FAQs - **Q**: When and where is Reading & Conversation: Josh Weil with Alan Heathcock being held? - **A:** Reading & Conversation: Josh Weil with Alan Heathcock takes place on Sun, 20 Sep, 2026 at 07:00 pm to Sun, 20 Sep, 2026 at 09:00 pm at Oldspeak, 3640 West Chinden Boulevard, Garden City, United States. - **Q**: Who is organizing Reading & Conversation: Josh Weil with Alan Heathcock? - **A:** Reading & Conversation: Josh Weil with Alan Heathcock is organized by Chelsea Major. ## Structured Data (JSON-LD) ```json [ { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "Event", "name": "Reading & Conversation: Josh Weil with Alan Heathcock", "image": "https://cdn-az.allevents.in/events1/banners/751cca822c1d492f4b247ea44033946b4d6cd91aea51c2d601411233cda6dd4d-rimg-w1200-h600-dc181818-gmir.jpg?v=1788336069", "startDate": "2026-09-20T19:00:00-06:00", "endDate": "2026-09-20T21:00:00-06:00", "url": "https://allevents.in/garden-city/reading-and-conversation-josh-weil-with-alan-heathcock/100001999411925893", "eventStatus": "https://schema.org/EventScheduled", "location": { "@type": "Place", "name": "Oldspeak", "address": { "@type": "PostalAddress", "streetAddress": "3640 West Chinden Boulevard", "postalCode": "83714", "addressLocality": "Garden City", "addressRegion": "ID", "addressCountry": "US" }, "geo": { "@type": "GeoCoordinates", "latitude": "43.62466", "longitude": "-116.2417762" } }, "eventAttendanceMode": "https://schema.org/OfflineEventAttendanceMode", "description": "Meet and listen to the author of the much anticipated new novel, WHAT CAME WEST — where True Grit meets The Revenant meets Lonesome Dove.", "offers": [ { "@type": "AggregateOffer", "availability": "https://schema.org/InStock", "priceCurrency": "USD", "availabilityStarts": "2026-09-02", "availabilityEnds": "2026-09-20T21:00:00-06:00", "validFrom": "2026-09-02", "lowPrice": "7.18", "highPrice": "30.65", "price": "7.18", "url": "https://allevents.in/garden-city/reading-and-conversation-josh-weil-with-alan-heathcock/100001999411925893" }, { "@type": "Offer", "availability": "https://schema.org/InStock", "priceCurrency": "USD", "availabilityStarts": "2026-09-02", "availabilityEnds": "", "validFrom": "2026-09-02", "url": "https://allevents.in/garden-city/reading-and-conversation-josh-weil-with-alan-heathcock/100001999411925893", "price": "7.18", "name": "Ticket to Reading & Conversation: Josh Weil" }, { "@type": "Offer", "availability": "https://schema.org/InStock", "priceCurrency": "USD", "availabilityStarts": "2026-09-02", "availabilityEnds": "", "validFrom": "2026-09-02", "url": "https://allevents.in/garden-city/reading-and-conversation-josh-weil-with-alan-heathcock/100001999411925893", "price": "30.65", "name": "Add a Signed Copy of What Came West" } ], "organizer": [ { "@type": "Organization", "name": "Chelsea Major", "url": "https://allevents.in/org/chelsea-major/18625221" } ] } ] ```