WriterHouse

Josh Weil spoke to an audience at WriterHouse on September 24 on the subject of "The Renegade Form: A Case for the Novella in Contemporary Fiction." Josh also read from his debut collection of novellas, The New Valley. Set in the hill country between West Virginia and Virginia and written in strong, masterful language laced with tenderness, the novellas examine the strength and fragility of familial bonds and the yearning for human connection that runs through the lives of three different men in rural America.

JOSH WEIL was born in the Blue Ridge Mountains of rural Virginia, to which he returned to write the novellas in his first book, The New Valley. His short fiction has been published in Granta, StoryQuarterly, New England Review, Narrative and other journals. He has been a regular contributor to The New York Times and written for Guernica, Orion, and Nylon Magazine. Since earning his MFA from Columbia University, he has received a Fulbright Grant, scholarships to the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences, a fellowship to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Dana Award in Portfolio. He currently divides his time between New York City and a cabin in southwestern Virginia, where he is at work on a novel.