Josh Weil is the author of the novel The Great Glass Sea (Grove Atlantic, 2014) and the novella collection The New Valley (Grove Atlantic, 2009). A New York Times Editors Choice, The New Valley won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, the New Writers Award from the GLCA, and a “5 Under 35” Award from the National Book Foundation. Weil’s other fiction has appeared in Granta, Esquire, Agni and One Story, and he has written non-fiction for The New York Times, The Sun, Oxford American, and Poets & Writers. A recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences, he has been the Tickner Writer-in-Residence at Gilman School, the Distinguished Visiting Writer at Bowling Green State University, and the Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi. Born in the Appalachian mountains of Southwest Virginia, he currently lives with his family in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas, where he is at work on a collection of stories.
The Great Glass Sea by Josh Weil
It’s difficult to write a comprehensive yet succinct critique of a work by someone who understands storytelling from the bones outward, who writes unsentimentally about a place he loves and uses exquisite language while doing it. That’s my particular challenge with Josh Weil’s literary novel The Great Glass Sea.
I’m reviewing The Great Glass Sea for our Edge of the Universe column because the springboard for the story is an audacious SF what-if: What if orbiting space mirrors could provide 24 hours of light to an agricultural area on earth? What if endless acres of farmland could be sheltered from the elements of winter under huge greenhouses, a sea of glass, and crops could be grown year round? This is the starting point of Weil’s thoughtful, elegiac novel about Russia, his lyrical character study of two brothers, ... Read More
