Like You'd Understand, Anyway

by Jim Shepard

Following his widely acclaimed Project X and Love and Hydrogen—“Here is the effect of these two books,” wrote the Chicago “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 a middle-aged Aeschylus taking his place at Marathon, still vying for parental approval. A maddeningly indefatigable Victorian explorer hauling his expedition, whaleboat and all, through the Great Australian Desert in midsummer. The first woman in space and her cosmonaut lover, caught in the star-crossed orbits of their joint mission. Two Texas high school football players at the top of their food chain, soliciting their fathers’ attention by leveling everything before them on the field. And the rational and compassionate chief executioner of Paris, whose occupation, during the height of the Terror, eats away at all he holds dear.Brimming with irony, compassion, and withering humor, these eleven stories are at once eerily pertinent and dazzlingly exotic, and they showcase the work of a protean, prodigiously gifted writer at the height of his form. Reading Jim Shepard, according to Michael Chabon, “is like encountering our national literature in microcosm.”

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Literature, Collections, Literary Fiction, Short Story Collection, Contemporary

224 pages, Hardcover

First published September 25, 2007

About the author

Jim Shepard is the author of seven novels, including most recently The Book of Aron, which won the Sophie Brody Medal for Achievement in Jewish Literature from the American Library Association and the PEN/New England Award for fiction, and five story collections, including his new collection, The World To Come. Five of his short stories have been chosen for the Best American Short Stories, two for the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and one for a Pushcart Prize. He teaches at Williams College.

Reviews

[Megha · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 stars? 4 stars? Let's say a high 3.

Now what are these stories like, anyway?

- Ending: One of the things that caught my eye is how Shepard chooses not to provide a denouement for some of his stories, but leaves us with the thoughts of the narrator at a crucial moment. He would leave the narrator in front of the two doors holding the lady or the tiger, leaving it up to the reader to imagine what happened next. This often saves his stories from what could have been a flat and predictable ending.

- Setting: Shepard puts his characters in extreme and adventurous conditions, usually very far removed from the kind of experiences most of us would have had. It could be an expedition group spending months in an uninhabited desert (before they had motor vehicles), an executioner from barbaric times, Valentina Tereshkova right before becoming the first woman to enter space or a warrior holding a spear, anticipating an attack at any moment.

The emotional setting, however, is not always so distant. The emotional content has often to do with the narrators' relations with family, friends or love. Threadbare father-son or brother-brother relations are the most common. He largely sticks with timeless emotions and carries them to a variety of time periods and situations.

- Characters: Since all the stories are written from a first-person point-of-view, the narrators are very self-aware and self-reflective, so as to be able to convey their thoughts to the reader. Barring one story, all have a male narrator. Female characters mostly appear only in small roles, as wives or mothers to complete the family. Perhaps the author isn't comfortable writing from a female point-of-view.

- Writing: Shepard doesn't resort to any gimmicks or theatrics, but simply lets the content hold up the stories. Given the research he must have done to come up with the unconventional settings, it makes sense not to obfuscate all of that with fancy writing techniques. What that gives us are event-driven and easily readable stories.

- At least five brothers, and a few sons, had to die for these stories to be written.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like You’d Understand Anyway is a collection of all first-person short stories, though the similarities between them end there. The settings and time periods range from the site of Hadrian’s Wall during the late Roman Empire, to present day Alaska, to Chernobyl during the nuclear meltdown, to gothic France, to summer camp in 1960s America.

In these stories, Shepard does something that very, very few contemporary do these days: he uses his imagination and has fun. No, you won’t find stories here about a struggling writer in New York City wrestling with ennui or a writing professor who longs for his younger days in Europe. You’ll find adventure stories of failed expeditions in the Australian outback and totally awesome hunts by lackluster Nazis for evidence of the yeti in Tibet during World War II. Each story is lovingly researched and each narrator has such surprisingly authentic and passionate voices that you’ll often slip into simply believing what you read.

Throughout the book, Shepard proves so many of his writing peers wrong: contemporary literature doesn’t have to be boring, and writing from experience doesn’t mean that you have to write about yourself. You can write a self-reflective story that has a lot of action. You can take thoughts and feelings that you’ve had and transfer them to different places and times.

And that’s the real beauty of the stories: Shepard has a genuine, almost scary handle on the human condition. Think you won’t relate to a Nazi yeti seeker or the first woman in space or a rage-filled defensive end on a high school football team? You’re wrong. As far as you’re being a hopelessly flawed human, Shepard’s got your number. He has that rare writer’s talent - to find combinations of words for feelings we can’t normally find combinations of words for. He’s simply a great storyteller.

[Steven Walle · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great collection of eleven short stories by Jim Sheppard. They depict two athletes on a Texas highschool football team, an explorer and his crew exploring the vast desert of Austrailia, an astronaught visiting outerspace for the first time to name a few. They are masterfully written and compiled. I would recommend this collection to everyone. Enjoy and Be Blessed. Diamond

[Heather · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book of short stories takes all the trends of contemporary fiction (premises that involve lots of background research, slang, and dudeliness) and gums them together into a smug, unreadable mess. I managed to finish 'Zero Meter Diving Team', the first story, but I assure you that is only because of my reader's guilt. I was able to make less and less headway into each story that followed. Alternate title for this book: Boring in Space.

[Amy · Rating 1 out of 5]

blah. out of eleven short stories, i really only liked one, a few were ok, and the rest were crap. i couldn't even finish some of them, and not being able to finish a short story is pretty ridiculous. the stories are grossly male-dominated, and the only story written from a female perspective was of course about a woman so lovesick that she could not properly do her job. if there were any other female characters, i do not recall, as they were so unmemorable. vomit.

[Gabriel Congdon · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wouldn't,


Three's rough for me. It's just, when i read Love & Hydrogen, I didn't know the Shepard Shtick, and I was all comma-browed, this time, I was ready (and eager) and for some reason my enthus wasn't as ism. In fact--and I'm a bad Shepard fan for saying this, but at times I liked the non-specialized stories better. Going into it I was all "fuck yeah lets go hang out with Greeks and Soviets, and whatnots," but actually, the stories about high school football and summercamp, I may have liked more. Sometimes if feels like lots of research framed by fights with brother/spouse.

But Shep is a killer writer. When I describe aspects of my life, I would quote, (no air fingers or credit) lines from this book. I feel a certain way and then I'd seen in words what these feelings are lined like. So, you know, Shep is still dope.

[Leslie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found myself more impressed with this book than in love with it. I've never read a short story collection with such a wide variety of settings: soldiers in ancient Greece, Texan high school football players, an Alaskan bush pilot secretly contemplating a vasectomy, Soviet astronauts, Nazi explorers in Tibet...

Carrying themes were how people often know they could've behaved better and don't/didn't; how sometimes circumstances shape us more than we shape them; and men whose problems tie back to inadequate parenting—also complicated relationships with brothers.

Often the characters emotional limitations struck me as true to life but made it difficult to feel invested in them.

Five stars for "Trample the Dead, Hurdle the Weak" (the football story), "The Zero Meter Diving Team," and perhaps the standout—"Sans Farine," the final story of the collection. I finished it and found myself turning back to reread and try to understand more. The story is from the perspective on a professional executioner whose wife leaves him during the French Revolution; it has a wonderful ending line, "He was already that empty narrow space between the raised blade and its destination: that opportunity gone in a tenth of a second, which would never return again." That story also seamlessly transitions from first person to third-person in the end without justification, which seems like the kind of thing an MFA class would tell one not to do, but it worked here, which was interesting/exciting.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you like short stories, you should not fail to pick up this volume, Shepard's third. Shepard's writing has a breadth pretty much unmatched in modern fiction -- he writes in wildly divergent voices and there's not a clumsy piece of prose, or even a misstep, in a single one of them.

If Jim Shepard doesn't win the National Book Award for this work, they should just abolish the damn award and have done with it. Either that or be honest about it and just give it to random books chosen by lot.

Because I know you're dying to know my favorites among this collection: it's a tie between "Courtesy for Beginners" and "Sans Farine."

Update: Well, the National Book Awards fell down on the job on this one. Surprise. However, the board of judges for The Story Prize -- apparently the only board of judges who read these short stories with their heads outside of their asses -- gave their annual prize to this book. Up yours, National Book Awards!

[Luke · Rating 2 out of 5]

After reading such praised reviews, a National Book award finalist to boot, and heeding a stong recommendation to, 'buy this book now' I am sadly disappointed. I have a love-hate relationship with short stories to begin with so am prone to being less than wooed when it comes to collections. Shepard is not a bad writer and not necessarily a bad story teller, its just that THESE didn't work. For me. Yes, kudos to him for spanning such a variety of settings and time-stamps in history and characters; all obviously well researched and certainly thorough (this seemed to be a re-occuring point of praise in several reviews...shoudln't anything that is historically referenced and technically specific be well researched?) I just didn't feel a whole lot of heart in these stories. They felt more of an exercise in variety than anything. I was hoping that this would open up the doors wide to explore the rest of his work, but instead has had the opposite effect.

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jim Shepard may be the finest living practitioner of the traditional short story form. His writing is direct, entertaining, insightful, gimmickless. Inventive and brilliant and perfectly formed, but in subtle ways that don't draw attention to themselves, or dissolve their readability. Their readability ism of a sort of breathless, action-heavy minimalism I associate mainly with Real-Life Adventure accounts in magazines. At worst, they can come off as exactly that: adventure stories, however artfully conveyed and far-flung in source. At best (which is to say most, if not all) they resonate. Through the eleven viewpoints presented here -- explorers, executioners, highschool football stars; historical and contemporary over three millennia -- Shepard builds an all-encompassing chorus of voices that find universality: in expectation and obligation to family and society, doomed grasping for a place in history (or doomed assurance of a place in history), and the unremitting indifference of the world, natural and human. And where these voices do merge across the eras, it's not so much due to Shepard's limitations as to his skill: each manages a deft touch of bitter humor that lets these stories become appropriately pitch-black devastating without ever becoming a slog.

(As an aside, his very finest story, the completely chilling "Classical Scenes of Farewell", is currently only available in McSweeney's 27. Presumably it'll be in his next collection.)

[Jeff Jackson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Technically brilliant first person stories set in far-flung locales and time periods, featuring female russian cosmonauts, alaskan pilots, texas high school footballers, nazi yeti hunters, executioners circa french revolution, etc, etc. Great details that keep stories from feeling like stunts. High points include hilarious 'Trample the Dead' and description of tidal wave in 'Pleasure Boating.'

Enjoyable overall, but Shephard compulsively fills in almost every last emotional and thematic detail for you. These stories lack the mystery and resonance of the work of a short story writer like, say, Flannery O'Connor or Eudora Welty. For all their formal brio, you're still being spoonfed.

This quote from Tom McCarthy says it better than I ever could: "Literature has to remain frustrating – to withhold something, remain incomplete – or it’s not literature anymore, but rather entertainment, edification or interpretation. That’s literature’s USP: staying unresolved, keeping its most vital messages unspoken, creating a zone of noise where everything and nothing is said at the same time."

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

This excellent, engaging collection of stories takes a remarkably broad look at masculine experiences throughout the ages, with emotional depth and a great deal of wit. The stories concern everyone from Chernobyl engineers to 19th century explorers in Australia to soldiers on Hadrian's wall to German anthropologist on the hunt for the Yeti in the 1930s to an executioner in the French Revolution to a miserable Connecticut teenager at summer camp in the 70s. One story has at its center a woman, the first woman in space as part of the Soviet space program, but primarily these stories look at the ordinary lives of men doing extraordinary things.

[Owen Kendall · Rating 5 out of 5]

Currently a finalist for The National Book Award, an award he should definitely win with the strength of these stories. Unfortunately he didn't win. Instead, Denis Johnson won the award for... actually he won it for JESUS'S SON, but I guess you could say he won it for TREE OF SMOKE.

READ THESE STORIES!

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was so overwhelmingly male that I thought the title was actually mocking me. Whether it was a tale of Yeti hunters or Chernobyl engineers or Hadrian's soldiers or a high school football star, the stories were irrevocably masculine. I do thank Shepherd, though, for lending credence to my long-held theory that The Who is a band for boys.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Let me first just clarify my rating system. If I give it four stars, that means I recommend it to you, Dear Reader, whoever you are. So don't take the lack of the fifth as a lack of enthusiasm! The fifth just signifies a) something I will reread and/or b) something that I was happy as a pig in shit while reading. SO, this puppy may get four stars, but I've been recommending it to everyone like John the Baptist recommended Jesus (please alert me if this is a crappy simile, because my Bible-reading friends APPARENTLY aren't available to me 24-7, WTFOMG).

Now. Back to the text, as they say in graduate school. Essentially, to understand the experience of this book, you need to imagine a man, constantly thwarted and cripplingly disappointed if not damaged by his family (who are also disappointed in him, which is often his main problem with them), with a tendency toward dry, matter-of-fact, emotionally open and casually hopeless first-person narratives. Now reincarnate said man:
*as a soldier of the Roman empire, guarding Hadrian's Wall (or, rather, a clerk of the Roman empire, doing paperwork on Hadrian's Wall, thereby disappointing his dad)
*as a high-school football player in one of those Texas towns (disappointing dad, brother, violent linebacker best friend, and potentially the whole town)
*as a typically ill-prepared and deluded 1800s surveyor of Central Australia (disappointing dad and also causing the deaths of his surrogate family, which they're none too happy about)
*as a Nazi searching for the Himalayan yeti as part of a Third Reich eugenics project (the implication is he's disappointing the Reichsfuhrer, which, you know, is especially traumatic)
*as a female Russian astronaut circa 1963 (disappointing the Russian space program)
*as the chief executioner for the French Revolution (disappointing his wife and all the executioners in his family, which is to say everyone)

There are more I can't remember, all of them exquisitely set in place and time. It's hard to imagine these having been published separately (which they all were, all in Important Fiction Journals) since despite the variety they're so clearly a matched set, variations in the key of extreme masculinity, but it's almost equally hard to imagine Shepard doing this much, and this varied, research over any short period of time.

If you like Hemingway, you'll like this, I think, but the craaaaazy thing is that if you don't like Hemingway (I don't) you may well STILL like this.

[Doug · Rating 5 out of 5]

Take these eleven stories, deep dives into an enormously wide range of landscape and time, slowly. Let them curl around a bit on your brain before you set off for the next one and on the chance you're not connecting with one, give it time, you will get hooked and you will learn something about a time or place you didn't know before, I guarantee, and you will learn about these things through an empathy you perhaps didn't know you had…but Jim Shepard had a hunch you did. Spend time with a scribe on Hadrian's Wall, in two-a-days for a Texas high school football power, experience historic tidal waves, Russian space flight, 19th century treks into Australian outback, and tag along through the Chang Tang with a couple of German scientists in search of Yeti in order to rationalize Third Reich racial theories.

The first story, "The Zero Meter Diving Team" fittingly packs an emotional slow burn bringing a uniquely human perspective to a historic event of our own time that (after reading this) truly feels like it's been swept under the world's collective carpet. This little 'inside-out' story on the Chernobyl disaster evokes more horror about technology galloping well beyond our un-firm human faculties than any journalistic account ever could.

It's Shepard's mastery of voice in these 1st person narrative stories that renders the historic moments they depict alive again, breathing, as if you are right there with these characters, brothers-in-arms. I was a lucky young man to have Jim as my intro to creative writing teacher years ago at Michigan, when he too was a young man just out of Brown. One of the simple and elegant lessons he left us with…writing fiction, developing a voice…it all starts first with your own eye and ear. This collection is dramatic testimony that Shepard's craft has developed a clarity of heart over the years that's enduring, unique and centered not on himself (as is this case with so many others in contemporary writing) but on the players on the stage before him. Shhhh. Watch. Listen. Read.

[Jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the most underrated writers today, Shepard can stand toe-to-toe with any living American author. It is sad that he is not mentioned more in discussions about the top living writers in America. He seems to be to young to fit with Roth and Co. and to old (read traditional) to be grouped with David Foster Wallace or Jonathan Franzen. Yet he writes short stories better than almost all of them (the sole exception being Roth's early stories which are as good as anything in American Literature). This collection only adds to Shepard's legacy as the pre-eminent American short story writer. Shepard has an uncanny, and almost unbelievable, ability to get inside the head of characters that vary so vastly that sometimes you feel as if you are reading Best American Stories 2007. From high school footbal players, to French Revolution executor, every story is poignant and well-drawn and most of all realistic. I've read in interviews that Shepard is a voracious reader (the only author I can imagine who read more, was Roberto Bolano, who said he read in the shower of all places) and it shows in these stories. So sit back and enjoy and don't expect any postmodern fireworks, or cute happy endings, just great American Fiction.

note: I would give it 4.5 stars if I could, but goodreads won't let me and the only reason I docked half a star was because I'm only twenty-six and I kinda like postmodern fireworks.

[Patrick McCoy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jim Shepherd’s 2007 short story collection, Like You’d Understand Anyway, was a finalist for the National Book Award and it’s easy to see why. It is a masterly collection of stories that range from heartfelt and painful tales of adolescence (“Proto-Scorpions of the Silurian,” ”Trample the Dead, Hurdle the Weak,” and “Courtesy For Beginners”) to exhaustively realistically researched historical tales of the past (Roman soldiers-“Hadarian’s Wall,” Nazi naturalists chasing Yetis-“Ancestral Legacies,” explorers in Australia-“The First South Central Australian Expedition,” Greeks at war-“My Aeschylus,” French Jacobin executioners-“Sans Farine”). Shepard infuses his characters with insight and humanity that brings the historical characters to life and allows us to imagine what it might have been like to have been living in those time periods. These stories were well-crafted and stayed in my consciousness long after reading. I feel the need to search out more of his work after reading this impressive collection.

[Shandy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really solid, engaging, and enjoyable. These stories take place in various lands and time periods, and a number of them must have required a pretty impressive level of research (one takes place at Chernobyl, another in the early days of the Russian space program, another among the executioners of revolutionary France).

[G · Rating 4 out of 5]

While it didn't have as strong a selection as "Love and Hydrogen", I love the way in which Shepard takes obscure, and not-so-obscure, historical characters and imbues them with a "modern" psychology that they had all along. And the stories set in the present day are equally striking.

[Rachel King · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite Jim Shepard collection.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I always thought Jim Shepard's use of history in his stories was a sort of gimmick. Happily, I was mistaken. Shepard clearly understands the importance of history and reads deeply about historical topics, but more than anything I think the topics give him new ideas for his fiction and enable him to branch out. Having said that, I think the historical settings and characters work better in some stories than in others. "The Zero Meter Diving Team," for instance, set during the Chernobyl crisis, was outstanding--and was written years before the HBO show. "Hadrian's Wall," about a Roman helping to defend Hadrian's Wall in Britain, was also quite good. But two of my favorite stories from this collection--"Trample the Dead, Hurdle the Weak" and "Courtesy for Beginners"--were not concerned with history at all. The first involved high school football in Texas while the second took place at summer camp. Maybe these stories were simply more relatable to a contemporary American reader who has played football and attended summer camp. When Shepard is at his best, no one can match him. But all his historical research did tend to intrude for me in a couple spots. With "Pleasure Boating in Lituya Bay," for instance, he creates a captivating story with interesting characters, including an Alaskan pilot, but Shepard disrupts the action of the story with historical facts about earthquakes and tidal waves in Lituya Bay, Alaska. While the facts are interesting, they feel like the smart kid in school trying to show off. I'm not sure they were integrated fully enough into the fiction. And while "The First South Central Australian Expedition," about some British explorers who attempted to explore the Australian interior, thinking they'd find a vast inland lake, was good, it stretched on too long. And while the final story, "Sans Farine," about an executioner in Revolution-era France, had a great premise, I could never really connect with the characters. Shepard does a great job using language and detail to try and get inside the head of people from different countries, cultures, and time-periods, and I think his stories are convincing, but I think ultimately it's an impossible task for an American writer to accurately depict life from the vantage of a 1960s Soviet astronaut, for instance. Nevertheless, I applaud him for making the effort. Too many writers don't take risks, and this is perhaps what I admire most about Shepard--his ability to step outside his comfort zone. When the stories work, they work amazingly well. Even when they don't work, they make for an interesting read unlike much else being published today.

[Lyndsay West · Rating 4 out of 5]

Here's an excerpt from my review of this book on my blog. You can check out the rest of the review here: http://humpdayhardbacks.blogspot.com/...

Like You’d Understand, Anyway is a petty title and, in a petty mood, I gladly picked it off the shelf. I recognized Jim Shepard’s name from his standout short story in The Best American Short Stories 2013. I still wish it was Shepherd, but I’ll allow it.

Like You’d Understand, Anyway is a collection of 11 short stories that each draw from a deep well of strained familial relations, namely brother-to-brother. Naturally, Shepard dedicated the book to his real-life brother. The first story follows a man who feels semi-responsible for an accident that results in his brothers’ deaths. When he asks one, “‘Was I ever the brother you hoped I would be?’” I wonder whom Shepard is speaking to (Shepard, 23). The context of his inspiration creates an atmosphere of intimacy, like I’m reading a diary or sitting at their family dinner table watching them argue over who gets to sit next to dad.

A word to the wise: Shepard is a poetic craftsman of words, but his stories are designed to bring about discomfort. One story literally says, “All day, every day, I’m sad” (Shepard, 30). Furthermore, he moves and grooves alllll over the map. His characters span a wide range of centuries and nationalities, and most of his stories clearly required factual research (like the Chernobyl disaster and exploration of the Great Australian Desert). One story features a high school football player who is haunted by the disappearance of his father, such that it undermines his playing. Another follows a couple of Nazis who go on a deadly, classified mission for the abominable snowman. Another trails a husband, plagued by an early childhood trauma, who gets a vasectomy without his wife knowing. Another highlights an executioner during the French Revolution tasked with the guillotining of the King and Queen, despite his wife’s reservations. You know, happy stuff! Most of his stories don’t provide a definitive end for the reader, but such is life.

I stand by my first impression of Shepard, in which he stopped me in my tracks and forced me to recall his name in a bookstore one and a half years after my encounter. Also, the pages of his short story collection are cool! They’re *deckle edged*, which is a term I just learned by Googling!

[Margaret Carmel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've read a lot of short story collections in the last two years or so, and this is one of the most unique.

Like You'd Understand, Anyway is a departure from most contemporary collections because of the settings. Shepard sets his stories during WW2 in Tibet, a 1960s summer camp, the ancient world, and places in between. He also tells his stories in first person, which draw the reader into these strange worlds in a way that feels like traveling around the world in just a few pages.

One of the most powerful things about this collection is how the stories are set in a broad range of places and times and people, but the core questions at the heart of the narrative are almost always deeply familiar. In these pages we see lots of brothers and fathers struggling to reconcile their relationship, unrequited love and characters facing down the questions of death. My favorite story here was "Pleasure Boating in Lituya Bay," about an Alaskan bush pilot and questioning his future as a father. It's one thing to tell the love story of a new couple, but to capture the messy and complicated emotions that come later is another altogether.

It's obvious that Shepard did a lot of research about the settings of his stories before putting pen to paper, which I both respect and got bogged down by. Some of the stories set farther back in the past felt difficult to relate to because he had to spend so much time on setting up the world and I didn't feel enough of a human connection. I respect these stories for their accuracy, but they weren't always fun to read.

I recommend this! I had a lot of fun, and some unexpected feelings too.

[Red Fox · Rating 4 out of 5]

Superb collection of short stories. Amazing range of topic and tone that makes the reader think this could be a "best of" collection by different authors.

Some favorites:

The Zero Meter Diving Team - set around Chernobyl, the father "quoted to us Strugatsky's dictum that reason was the ability to use the powers of the surrounding world without ruining that world" - and graffiti around Chernobyl, "the negligence and incompetence of some should not be concealed by the patriotism of others."

Pleasure Boating in Lituya Bay - on living in Alaska and falling in love, "We honeymooned in San Francisco. Here's what that was like for me: I still root for that city's teams."

The First South Central Australian Expedition - Brits trying to find a "central sea" in the middle of the Australian desert - "One of my father's favorite resolutions was always that life was worthless save the good that one might do. 'We're forced to conclude, then, that for him, life was worthless.'"

Eros 7 - on the first woman in space during the Soviet space program - "And even then I was given a glimpse of how I'd always turn my back to what was offered; how I'd never fully grasp, flailing, at whatever charities the world was able to dispense; how what I thought was my reach was really only my attempt to dismiss, to expel, or to disavow."

Sans Farine - on an executioner and his family during the French Revolution - "Perhaps, I told her at dinner, my curse from God was that I lacked that stone tabernacle within the soul in which I could treasure absolute truths."

[Emily Polcyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well-written and well-researched but most of these short stories were just kind of boring 🫣 With a huge variety of settings and characters (Australian expeditions, the first woman in outer space, an executor during the French Revolution, high school football players, etc.), this collection has an interesting concept but ultimately got a little research-y for me, like the author had to justify all the research I’m sure he did by including long descriptions of context and setting that did not do anything for me. Lots of themes of messy families, of wanting connection but not knowing how to get it, of knowing what the right choice is but still not making it. Ultimately a book about emotional disconnection is always going to be a challenge to not make your characters just feel extremely distant from the audience, and I don’t think this threaded that needle.

Favorite stories:
The Zero Meter Diving Team (featuring a head engineer at Chernobyl)
Trample the Dead, Hurdle the Weak (featuring football players in rural Texas and a culture of violence and retribution)
Sans Fatima (featuring the executioner in revolutionary France)

Disliked:
Eros 7 (the first woman in space ((and our only female narrator in the entire collection)) disassociates through the whole experience bc her situationship doesn’t like her back)
My Aeschylus (zzzzz honk shoo I don’t even remember this one because I kept falling asleep every time I tried to read it I swear it took days)

[Lucy Cummin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This story collection has languished on my shelves for over a decade and so it went on the ROOT pile. A third of those books turn out to be ones I don't want to read, never did, but wouldn't admit it, but the rest have turned out to be gems, including this one. The stories have a similar underpinning, a smart weird kid/adult in some isolated situation, either to do with family or work. Things generally do not go well. A Nazi era ornithologist sent by Himmler to explore Tibet, nominally to bolster H's super bizarre Aryan origin theories, but in fact, seeking the Yeti. (Irony, yeh). A boy with a younger brother with emerging schizophrenia and clueless parents sent off to a horrible camp. The first female Russian cosmonaut. Explorers of the Australian Outback in the 1840's . . . there is often an older brother or mentor who has whacked the younger one into some kind of shape, able to cope with whatever life dishes out. The stories do probe, most of them, this male compulsion to be tough, act tough, die tough if need be, all the while totally aware of how stupid and self-defeating this behaviour is. Totally worth reading if you come across this book somewhere! ****

[Mary Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really, really love Jim Shepard's writing. It simultaneously makes nothing and everything about the stories obvious. I read once that the main tenet of good writing is that it feels both surprising and inevitable, and Shepard has mastered that in this collection.

The only reason this isn't a 5 star review is the subject matter itself. I like that there were themes uniting most of the stories in the book (oh man, do a lot of people have brother issues), but it got a bit repetitive at times. The only story with a female narrator was about near-pathological lovesickness, which would have been fine if there were literally any other female narrators. Because there weren't, it came off a bit sexist. Also, there's an underlying queerness to a number of the stories, like "Trample the Dead, Hurdle the Weak," "The First South Central Australian Expedition," and "Eros 7." None of these stories were bad at all (they were actually some of my favorites), but it would have been a richer collection if any of them had explored queer themes more overtly.

[Tripp]

More historical short fiction from Jim Shepard.

"The Zero Meter Diving Team" is a first person, present tense account (but a present tense account that moves to past tense for most of the story) of Boris Yakovlevich Prushinsky, chief engineer of the Dept. of Nuclear Energy. HIs younger brother, Mikhail, was a turbine engineer working at the Chernobyl reactor on 26 April 1986, when its core melted down. Prushinsky indicts Soviet bureaucracy as well as his own aloofness regarding his family, especially his doomed brother. Shepard's trademark humor, dry and biting, is displayed to full effect, as with, "Our school's directed all their efforts to inculcating industriousness (somewhat successfully), obedience (fairly successfully), and toadyism (very successfully)."

"Proto-Scorpions of the Silurian" is a first person, present tense account from the POV of an anonymous 7th grade boy who is sick at home, playing cards with his brother while his mother and father stage a minor argument about an article the father is sure he saved and equally sure his wife threw out. The brother has already been institutionalized once, something involving fits of blinding anger. Shepard is famously opposed to epiphany in stories, and this one shows that. His father asks him if he wants to help his brother or not.
"So you wanta help him," he wants to know.
"Yeah," I tell him, tearing up.
"Well then why don't you help him?" he wants to know.
Because there's what we want, and what we do, I'd figured out, even then.
"You want to help him?" he asks again.
"Not really," I tell him, sitting there. Not really, I tell myself, now.

"Hadrian's Wall" is the first person, present tense account of Felicius Victor, scribe for special services of the over-extended 20th Cohort, serving in Britannia on Hadrian's Wall. His father is a retired soldier finding it difficult to live on a soldier's pension, and so pitifully trying to re-enlist. He is negligent on watch duty one night and allows a breach of the wall by raiding Britons. Centurions exact their usual ten-fold vengeance the next day, but Felicius is disenchanted with everything about the empire. Rome's genius, he says, is it's ability to turn brother against brother and father against son--"Since what could have been easier than that?"

In "Trample the Dead, Hurdle the Weak," Shepard returns to contemporary society for this story of macho football culture in a Texas high school. A player named Royce is convinced a player on a rival team is his half-brother, last name Corey, via his dad who left when Royce was two. The teams might play each other in the tournament, but in the meanwhile he does things like look up all the Coreys in the Beaumont area, and call the three numbers the operator gives him. Shepard works back and forth between Texas high school football, pitiless and brutal, and this young man's unanswered questions about his father, his half-brother, and himself.

Ernst Shaefer is the first person narrator of "Ancestral Legacies," a present tense account of Operation Tibet, an effort of the Nazis, consisting entirely of Shaefer and one assistant, to locate the core of the Nordic-Aryan linguistic legacy in the Himalayans, and, oh yes, incite the Tibetan army against British troops. Instead, they are haunted and stalked by yeti, a species which Shaefer believes is mythical, merely the most recent manifestation of part of Himmler's occultist babble. With his assistant, Beger, crippled in an accident and slowly dying of infection, and his sherpas growing more distant, literally, as Shaefer drives them deeper into yeti territory, the odds of a happy end dwindle, though not before some of Shaefer's hardened opinions about racial superiority have softened ever so slightly.

"Pleasure Boating in Lituya Bay" is another first person, present tense story. The narrator, a man, wants no more children, though his wife does. He already has enough difficulty speaking with his one child, a son, and his own childhood, comprising two abandonments and one disaster, complicates matters. Concerning an earthquake-generated tsunami in Alaska's Lituya Bay in 1958, Shepard captures the terror of the world's tallest recorded wave, an incredible 1,720 feet, in his unique voice:
"A day or two later, the geologists started arriving. No one believed the height of the wave at first. People thought any devastation that high on the slopes had to have been caused by landslides. But they came around."

Other stories, equally fine, concern a doomed expedition to south-central Australia in 1840, Aeschylus, the Soviet initiative in the 1960s to have the first female in space, a desultory summer camp that includes the teen protagonist of "Proto-Scorpions," and, finally, the story of Charles-Henri Sanson, latest in a long line of French executioners, who unluckily serves in that role during both the monarchy and the Terror. I'll close with a quote from this last story, "Sans Farine," that describes the execution of an attempted regicide.

"No one had been quartered in France since Ravaillac, more than a century before. I went to my father, who said he had no advice to give. I offered to resign my commission, but my grandmother summoned my uncle, executioner of Reims, to steady me. Our assistants were to handle the preliminaries, and on the appointed day drank until they could barely stand. They tottered between the instruments while the crowd jeered at their fumblings and shouted abuse. The hand that held the knife was severed and boiling oil and lead were poured into the wound. The man's screams were such that we could not hear each others instructions. Then the horses only dislocated his limbs without separating them from the trunk. The executioner's sword lodged in one of his shoulder joints. I had to run and find an axe."

[Michael Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of the most visceral, macho collection of stories I've ever read. Even the women are tough in the way of adventuresome characters. There are tales of survivors of Chernobyl, Pacific island tidal waves and the French Revolution. There are stories of Roman legionnaires, early cosmonauts and modern dysfunctional families. There must have been a ton of research in putting these together and getting all the details to sound authentic, and it is exhausting to read, but strangely, as much as you may be turned off to what you're "watching up on the screen," you will find it difficult to turn away because the writing is so good. I'll be ready for another Jim Shepard collection in a while, but need a break of something light and amusing in between. Highly recommended for action-adventure readers. Also, be prepared for endings that feel in media res rather than conclusive. It's just the way he writes.