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Learn moreCulling the vastness of experience—from its bizarre fringes and breathtaking pinnacles to the mediocre and desperately below average—like an expert curator, Jim Shepard populates this collection with characters at once wildly diverse and wholly fascinating.
A “black world” operative can’t tell his wife a word about his daily activities, but doesn’t resist sharing her confidences. A young Alpine researcher is smitten by the girlfriend of his dead brother, killed in an avalanche he believes he caused. An unlucky farm boy becomes the manservant of a French nobleman who’s as proud of having served with Joan of Arc as he’s aroused by slaughtering children. A free spirit tracks an ancient Shia sect, becoming the first Western woman to travel the Arabian Deserts. From the inventor of the Godzilla epics to a miserable G.I. in New Guinea, each is complicit in his or her downfall and comes to learn that, in love, knowing better is never enough.
Jim Shepard us the author of more than six novels and four collections of stories. His work has been published in the New Yorker, Atlantic, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Zoetrope, Playboy, and Vice, among other periodicals. He teaches at Williams College.
Bronson Pinchot, Audible’s Narrator of the Year for 2010, has won Publishers Weekly Listen-Up Awards, AudioFile Earphones Awards, Audible’s Book of the Year Award, and Audie Awards for several audiobooks, including Matterhorn, Wise Blood, Occupied City, and The Learners. A magna cum laude graduate of Yale, he is an Emmy- and People’s Choice-nominated veteran of movies, television, and Broadway and West End shows. His performance of Malvolio in Twelfth Night was named the highlight of the entire two-year Kennedy Center Shakespeare Festival by the Washington Post. He attended the acting programs at Shakespeare & Company and Circle-in-the-Square, logged in well over 200 episodes of television, starred or costarred in a bouquet of films, plays, musicals, and Shakespeare on Broadway and in London, and developed a passion for Greek revival architecture.
Reviews
“Shepard’s cataclysmic renderings are both terrifying and awe-inspiring. There’s a word for that too—sublime.”
“Shepard’s use of relatively accurate biographical fact is bent to his own dramatic needs. Unlike memoirs that skew the truth, this is fiction that uses truth to warp into its own staged, often memoir-like reality.”
“Each one of these eleven stories stands out for its masterly fusion of technique and subject.”
“There is so much knowledge, insight, feeling, and artistry in each engrossing Shepard story, he must defy some law of literary physics.”
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