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Jan 16, 2018 | ISBN 9780525432319 Buy
Feb 21, 2017 | ISBN 9781524731809 Buy
Feb 21, 2017 | ISBN 9781524731816 Buy
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Jan 16, 2018 | ISBN 9780525432319
Feb 21, 2017 | ISBN 9781524731809
Feb 21, 2017 | ISBN 9781524731816
Bursting with wicked humor and driven by an incomparable understanding of what it means to be human, The World to Come is the inimitable work of “the most ambitious story writer in America” (The Daily Beast).Now a major motion pictureShepard traverses both borders and centuries, seamlessly inhabiting a multitude of disparate men and women, and giving voice to visionaries, pioneers, and secret misfits—from nineteenth-century explorers departing on one of the Arctic’s most nightmarish expeditions to twentieth-century American military wives maintaining hope at home. Shepard’s characters confront everything from the emotional pitfalls of everyday life to colossal catastrophes, battling natural forces, the hazards of new technology, and their own implacable shortcomings. “[Shepard] has a knack for compressing a novel’s worth of life into 30 or 40 pages.” —The Boston Globe
“Without a doubt the most ambitious story writer in America,” according to The Daily Beast, Jim Shepard now delivers a new collection that spans borders and centuries with unrivaled mastery. These ten stories ring with voices belonging to–among others–English Arctic explorers in one of history’s most nightmarish expeditions, a young contemporary American negotiating the shockingly underreported hazards of our crude-oil trains, eighteenth-century French balloonists inventing manned flight, and two mid-nineteenth-century housewives trying to forge a connection despite their isolation on the frontier of settlement. In each case the personal is the political as these characters face everything from the emotional pitfalls of everyday life to historic catastrophes on a global scale. In his fifth collection, Shepard makes each of these wildly various worlds his own, and never before has he delineated anything like them so powerfully.
JIM SHEPARD is the author of seven previous novels, most recently The Book of Aron (winner of the 2016 PEN New England Award, the Sophie Brody medal for achievement in Jewish literature, the Ribalow Prize for Jewish literature, the Clark Fiction Prize,… More about Jim Shepard
“Jim Shepard [is] an outrageously versatile and gifted fiction writer.” —The Washington Post“[Shepard’s] stories come bearing enough unimpeachable detail to ensure they never sink into the mush of a half-baked world. . . . [His] approach gives the individual stories heft and [his] collections a dizzying range.” —The New York Times Book Review“Arresting. . . . [Shepard] has a knack for compressing a novel’s worth of life into 30 or 40 pages.” —The Boston Globe “An astonishingly powerful demonstration of fiction’s capacity to transport us across time and space. . . . An absolute pleasure to read.” —The Christian Science Monitor “Stirring. . . . The title story . . . left me weeping.” —Polly Rosenwaike, San Francisco Chronicle
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