A thirteen-year-old hatches a plan of escape, solace, and utter independence through a dream of flight that’s both literal and figurative in this engrossing novel by National Book Award finalist Jim Shepard. As beset by the world as any thirteen-year-old — and maybe a little more so — Biddy Siebert does his best to negotiate both the intimacies and isolations of his world and...
A New York Times Notable Book: A lethal accident turns life into a waking nightmare for a mother and her son in this gripping novel of secrecy and dread. Abandoned by her husband, Joanie Mucherino and her eleven-year-old son, Todd, struggle to cope while dealing with their comically tactless and intrusive Italian family. Further complicating things, Joanie now seems available...
A shy and apolitical herpetologist-in-training finds the weight of history bearing down on him as the effects of repression ramp up in his country. In an unspecified country that combines elements of Chile under its military regime, South Africa under apartheid, and Italy under fascism, fifteen-year-old Karel Roeder asks only to be left alone to learn from Albert, his mentor at...
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...
During the air war over Germany, the crew of a B-17 Flying Fortress tries to achieve some competence as a unit before their most catastrophic mission yet. They call their plane “Paper Doll,” the joke being its suggestion of flimsiness, inconsequence, and perishability, and none of them, from the veterans to the newcomers, feel the bravery they’d like to project. But now,...
In the wilderness of junior high, Edwin Hanratty is at the bottom of the food chain. His teachers find him a nuisance. His fellow students consider him prey. And although his parents are not oblivious to his troubles, they can't quite bring themselves to fathom the ruthless forces that demoralize him daily. Sharing in these schoolyard indignities is his only friend, Flake....
The acclaimed National Book Award finalist — "one of the United States' finest writers," according to Joshua Ferris, "full of wit, humanity, and fearless curiosity" — now gives us a novel that will join the short list of classics about children caught up in the Holocaust. Aron, the narrator, is an engaging if peculiar and unhappy young boy whose family is driven by the German...
Following Like You’d Understand, Anyway — awarded the Story Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award — Jim Shepard returns with an even more wildly diverse collection of astonishingly observant stories. Like an expert curator, he populates the vastness of human experience — from its bizarre fringes and lonely, breathtaking pinnacles to the hopelessly mediocre and...
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