Like You'd Understand, Anyway: Stories (edit title)

• Rated 0 stars

“Overview: Editorial Review.

Following his widely acclaimed Project X and Love and Hydrogen—“Here is the effect of these two books,” wrote the Chicago Tribune: “A reader finishes them buzzing with awe”—Jim Shepard now gives us his first entirely new collection in more than a decade.

Like You’d Understand, Anyway reaches from Chernobyl to Bridgeport, with a host of narrators only Shepard could bring to pitch-perfect life. Among them: a middle-aged Aeschylus taking his place at Marathon, still vying for parental approval. A maddeningly indefatigable Victorian explorer hauling his expedition, whaleboat and all, through the Great Australian Desert in midsummer. The first woman in space and her cosmonaut lover, caught in the star-crossed orbits of their joint mission. Two Texas high school football players at the top of their food chain, soliciting their fathers’ attention by leveling everything before them on the field. And the rational and compassionate chief executioner of Paris, whose occupation, during the height of the Terror, eats away at all he holds dear.

Brimming with irony, compassion, and withering humor, these eleven stories are at once eerily pertinent and dazzlingly exotic, and they showcase the work of a protean, prodigiously gifted writer at the height of his form. Reading Jim Shepard, according to Michael Chabon, “is like encountering our national literature in microcosm.”
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• Rated 0 stars

“So far, so great.”

• Rated 5 stars

“Shepard's stories take place in all kinds of settings: Chernobyl, on Hadrian's Wall, at a contemporary high school football powerhouse, among Germans in Tibet as WWII commences, at the sight of a terrible tidal wave in Alaska, on an ill-fated 1840 expedition into the Australian interior, with Aeschylus as he goes to a hopeless battle, with the first Soviet woman cosmonaut, with a boy at a particularly awful summer camp, and with an executioner during the French Revolution.

The stories share two factors in common: they take place during disastrous, or at least violent events, and they address the question of how people relate to their families and loved ones in the face of danger and disaster. Shepard brings off his doomed and distraught characters with real compassion and empathy. The results, put frankly, are fascinating.

This wonderfully diverse collection avoids the vagueness that sometimes makes modern stories dull to read. Highly recommended!”

• Rated 5 stars

“From: Jim Shepard [mailto:James.R.Shepard@williams.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, March 26, 2008 11:41 AM
To: Steve Leveen
Subject: Re: RE:


Dear Steve,
Thanks for such a gracious and generous note. And I agree about the kiss.

Have fun tonight --

All best,

Jim

On Mar 26, 2008, at 8:26 AM, Steve Leveen wrote:


Dear Jim,

That's beautiful. Many thanks. I'll bring a copy of this to our meeting tonight and be a hero, thanks to you.

I'm amazed at the quality of your writing...marveling at how you seem to capture the Soviet spirit in "The Zero Meter Diving Team" and "Eros 7". As for simultaneously being there and not, "Pleasure Boating in Lituya Bay" is startling. How could he possibly contemplate that and not even discuss it with his wife!?! And he loves her so much. That sentence, "She kissed me the way lost people must act when they find water in the desert." Every guy should experience such a kiss at least once in his life.

Anyway, thanks for your art.

All best wishes for continued success,

Steve




--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Jim Shepard [mailto:James.R.Shepard@williams.edu]
Sent: Tuesday, March 25, 2008 3:40 PM
To: Steve Leveen
Subject:


Dear Steve,


Harold forwarded me your email, and request. I'd be happy to help out, however I can. I'm not sure I had five specific things in mind when I made that comment, but off the top of my head, some of the emotional and thematic preoccupations that do come up persistently in my fiction are: the ethical costs of passivity; the gradual ways in which we can become complicit in the wrongdoing of charismatic (and even non-charismatic) figures; and the extent to which we can simultaneously be there and not there for those to whom we're supposed to be connected unconditionally. Those are a few ideas important to my work as I understand it, anyway.


I hope that's a help. I wish I could be there for The Mules' discussion --


All best,


Jim






Dear Harold,


My bookgroup, The Mules, will be discussing Jim's book on Wednesday evening. I read with interest his interview on our site but was left with one shoe in the air. Namely, the last sentence of this paragraph...


Oh, boy: intuitively. Though as I was assembling the stories and choosing their order, what you're calling their harmonic effect was evident to me. That seems logical, actually, since the subjects might be bizarrely varied, but the emotional center from which they've all been generated is the same. In other words, while lots of people have talked about how different my narratives and/or my narrative voices might be, the emotional preoccupations tend to be very similar. I probably obsess about the same five things, over and over.


What five things I wonder?


Perhaps you could forward this email to him. I've really been enjoying his stories and it would be grand to take a paragraph from Jim to the meeting...




All best,


Steve
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• Rated 4 stars

“Nice collection of stories, but I liked his more playful "Love and Hydrogen" better. Backdrops include a couple Nazis looking for the Yeti in Tibet, an expedition through the Australian outback, summer camp, the Chernobyl accident, Russian spaceflight and an 18th Century French executioner's tale. These expertly crafted first-person tales are chock full of adventure. But this isn't pulp fiction, folks. It's highbrow lit, so it's really about what's going on in the narrator's heads. Or is it?”

• Rated 5 stars

“Incredible stories, beautiful writing. His earlier collection, Love and Hydrogen is also a "must read." ”