WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., Sept. 28 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ --
"'Like You'd Understand, Anyway' serves as testament not only
to Jim Shepard's talents but also to the power of the short
story itself, forged from the world with a sharp eye and
a careful ear, serving no agenda but literature's primary
and oft-forgotten one: the delight of the reader," writes
Daniel Handler (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket) in the Sunday New York
Times Book Review (Sept. 23).
Shepard's new book skips the reader across time and space.
From 19th- century Australian frontier to Hadrian's Wall
to the 1986 Chernobyl tragedy, each of the 11 first-person
narratives in "Like You'd Understand Anyway" (Knopf, 2007)
"glories in the sheer too-muchness of life -- its superabundance
of emotion, incident, and sensory delight." (Kirkus)
Shepard says he chooses stories that are "usually moments in which
human beings have found themselves in extraordinarily
difficult, and memorable, positions that resonate with me, personally,
in emotional terms. In other words, zeppelins themselves don't get me
going; it's the position in which a zeppelin can place somebody that
generates the initial impulse for a story." (for more, go here)
Jim Shepard 