From this prodigiously talented writer comes a stunningly original fictional life of the German director F. W. Murnau (1888 1931). Murnau ranks as a founding father of the cinema, not least for his legendary horror film, Nosferatu. Here he is revealed as a hermetic genius who turns against himself, becoming in a sense his own vampire. What shadows Jim Shepard s Murnau through the airfields of the Great War to Berlin in the twenties and to the virtual invention of filmmaking is the conflict between his impossibly high ideals and his heartbreaking memories of love betrayed and love lost....
From this prodigiously talented writer comes a stunningly original fictional life of the German director F. W. Murnau (1888 1931). Murnau ranks as a f...
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. Branded together as misfits, their fury simmers quietly in the hallways, classrooms, and at home, until an unthinkable idea offers them a spectacular and terrifying release. From Jim Shepard, one of the most...
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 hi...
I've been a problem baby, a lousy son, a distant brother, an off-putting neighbor, a piss-poor student, a worrisome seatmate, an unreliable employee, a bewildering lover, a frustrating confidante and a crappy husband. Among the things I do pretty well at this point I'd have to list darts, re-closing Stay-Fresh boxes, and staying out of the way. This is the self-eulogy offered early on by the unwilling hero of the opening story in this collection, a dazzling array of work in short fiction from a master of the form. The stories in Love and Hydrogen--familiar to readers from...
I've been a problem baby, a lousy son, a distant brother, an off-putting neighbor, a piss-poor student, a worrisome seatmate, an unreliable employe...
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...
Following his widely acclaimed Project X and Love and Hydrogen--"Here is the effect of these two books," wrote the Chicago Tribune: <...
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 desperately below average--with brilliant scientists, reluctant soldiers, workaholic artists, female explorers, depraved murderers, and deluded losers, all wholly convincing and utterly fascinating.
Following Like You'd Understand, Anyway--awarded the Story Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award--Jim Shepard returns with an even m...
A rediscovered masterpiece: an unblinking view of the Holocaust through a child's eyes Told from the perspective of a child slowly awakening to the atrocities surrounding him, Childhood is a searing story of the Holocaust that no reader will soon forget. As five-year-old Jona waits with his mother and father to emigrate from Nazi-occupied Amsterdam to Palestine, they are awakened at night, put on a train, and eventually interred in the camps at Bergen-Belsen. There, what at first seems to be a merely dreary existence soon reveals itself to be one of the worst horrors...
A rediscovered masterpiece: an unblinking view of the Holocaust through a child's eyes Told from the perspective of a child slowly awakeni...
Small and sullen, Aron is eight years old when his family moves from a rural Polish village to hectic Warsaw. At first gradually and then ever more quickly, his family's opportunities for a better life vanish as the occupying German government imposes harsh restrictions. Officially confined to the Jewish quarter, with hunger, vermin, disease and death all around him, Aron makes his way from apprentice to master smuggler until finally, with everyone for whom he cared stripped away from him, his only option is Janusz Korczak, the renowned doctor, children's rights advocate, and radio host who...
Small and sullen, Aron is eight years old when his family moves from a rural Polish village to hectic Warsaw. At first gradually and then ever more qu...
