Few writers can match Lewis Buzbee at capturing the American family disrupted by challenges from the outside world, or from within. These are powerful, moving stories of such families. Even when life conspires to tear them apart, Buzbee's families cope, they figure out what comes next. Though not connected in any narrative sense, the stories share a common thread: how to live after the disaster, after the gold rush is over and the gold has run out. Still, Buzbee's characters dream big and love deep, and each story in the collection is raw at the core, wholly memorable, and dedicated to the courage of loving. <P>Anchoring this collection is the novella "An American Son," destined to become a classic. Here is a story filled with pathos and humor about a 17-year-old high school junior who, to the amazement and utter consternation of his parents, defects for a time to the Soviet Union and becomes a writer, returning eventually to the Best Westerns of America. It is a vehicle that provides Buzbee with a new leverage on contemporary culture, and a hip take on the writer's life. <P>Lewis Buzbee is a third-generation Californian, and has been writing since age 12. After earning his MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers, he published his first collection of short stories, "Fliegelman's Desire," from Ballentine Books. A former bookseller and rep for Chronicle, his book on reading and the publishing business, "The Yellow Lighted Bookshop," is to be released simultaneously from Graywolf.

"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." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

A third-generation Californian, 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, eventually managing Printers Inc. in Palo Alto). In 1986, he became a rep for Chronicle, in northern California. He earned his MFA from Warren Wilson (Swannanoa, NC).