Jason Buchholz writes novels about people, their relationships, and their connection to place, which might be the soil beneath them or an ancestral homeland lost through diaspora. As the editorial manager of kn literary, he oversees a busy guild of like-minded editorial professionals, who support aspiring authors with coaching, editing, and writing services. He has been honored to contribute to the development of hundreds of manuscripts. Past writing jobs have included stints in journalism, travel writing, and at a literary agency. When he’s not writing or editing, he spends his time exploring the California landscape, either in solitude or in the company of his son and daughter. He has an MFA from the University of San Francisco and his first novel, A Paper Son, was published in 2016 by Tyrus Books / Simon & Schuster.
Jason is currently at work on his follow up novel, The Cartographer of Sands.
A Paper Son by Jason Buchholz
Tyrus/Simon & Schuster, 2016
On the first day of school after winter break, Peregrine Long, a third-grade teacher who moonlights as a writer, discovers the image of a family floating on his tea. The image inspires a story—it’s Canton, 1925, and the family has just returned from America. After he publishes the opening of the serial in a local journal, Eva Wong appears at Peregrine’s door, journal in hand, and accuses him of stealing her family’s history. She’s not concerned with the supposed theft, though—she just wants to know what happened to her Uncle Henry.
So Peregrine becomes the unwitting guide in a search for a boy who’s been missing for eighty-five years—a search that begins just as an unrelenting downpour sets upon San Francisco. He is joined by his brash, headstrong sister and an exotic polyglot who teaches kindergarten by morning and spends nights in her seaside apartment, beckoning to ghosts ships and cataloguing their arrivals. An exquisite exploration of the Pacific immigration experience, A Paper Son is a magical debut about memory, love, loss, and the power of storytelling.
“Buchholz’s gripping debut is a clever supernatural thriller that plays with readers’ narrative expectations. Rich, interesting characters fill this fast-paced, magical realist novel about family connections.”
— Publisher’s Weekly
“The rain will not stop falling on San Francisco. Third grade teacher Peregrine Long…begins to write about Li-Yu, the daughter of Chinese immigrants to America who travels in the 1920s to her husband’s home in China. …Peregrine thinks he’s creating her story…but an older woman shows up on his doorstep demanding to know why he is writing about her family history. That is only the beginning of a series of strange events that envelop Peregrine, his sister, and his girlfriend in this wonderfully imaginative novel. Buchholz constructs a world that is both familiar and strange, where magical events are layered on top of the everyday, the distinction between them not always clear. The mystery of the story, while a powerful driver of the book, becomes almost secondary to the wonder of it all.” — Booklist
“...a prophetic and engrossing supernatural thriller examining how memory surfaces after a near death experience...a richly woven and haunting tale of memory, loss and identity, in which the ocean serves as the bridge that separates and binds the two distinct timelines together. A Paper Son is a magical journey through memory and history, with Peregrine acting as the medium for voices that were silenced and lost in the pre-World War II immigration void. What makes Buchholz's debut sing is not the mystery, but how the characters handle and rise above their exceptional circumstances to come to terms with a painful and forgotten period of Asian American history.” — Shelf Awareness