Joseph Coulson

A Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection
Winner of ForeWord Magazine's Gold Medal in Literary Fiction

Opening in the Great Depression and moving forward through five decades to the fall of Richard Nixon, The Vanishing Moon chronicles two generations of a working-class family.

The first narrator, Stephen Tollman, looks back on his early adventures with his brother Phil, as both boys try to cope with their family's rapid descent into poverty. As World War II approaches, Katherine Lennox, a musician and political activist, offers an outsider's view of the Tollmans, mesmerizing both Stephen and his brother with her talent and revolutionary ideas. Later, Philip's son, James, gives voice to the family's second generation, as he comes of age amidst a summer of assassinations and civil unrest and strives to understand the roots of his father's deep unhappiness. Stephen returns to finish the story, struggling to hold his own against the currents of memory and abandoned dreams.

Told with the compression and intensity of a poem, The Vanishing Moon is a novel of desire, unyielding necessity, and the people and places that inevitably disappear from our lives.

"Will remind readers of classic authors like Steinbeck and Zola, or perhaps such contemporary masters of wounded male pride and self-doubt as Raymond Carver and Russell Banks." --The Buffalo News

"An ambitious effort that heralds the arrival of an intriguing talent.... Achieves the quiet beauty of William Maxwell's finest work--generous, episodic, elegiac but not sentimental..."--The Nation

"A beautifully told story about family bonds, love, loss, and the power of memory over our lives." --The Bloomsbury Review

"Assured and purposeful...Coulson infuses each surprising and evocative moment with great feeling and mythic resonance...creating a somberly beautiful family saga." --Booklist

"This novel captures the collective memory of an American working-class family, with all its pain and poetry. In its dramatic sweep, the book becomes nothing less than a history of the twentieth century in the United States. Joseph Coulson is what we used to call (with apologies to the vegetarians) a meat and potatoes storyteller: clear, vivid, big-hearted. So many unheard voices speak and sing through his voice. Listen." --Martín Espada