Like You'd Understand, Anyway
By Jim Shepard
Publisher: Knopf
224 pages
$23.00
#9. Like You'd Understand, Anyway
by Jim
Shepard
Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
224 pages
$23.00
Wildly inventive, and at
the same time curiously dry and precise, Shepard's stories feel both
minimalist and maximalist at the same time: minimal in their obsessive
attention to historical detail, and enormous in their geographical scope
and in the extreme emotions that the characters — cosmonauts, Victorian
explorers, Texan football players, Aeschylus (yes, that Aeschylus) — cycle
through. Shepard scours history and geography — from Chernobyl to Alaska
to Tibet — in search of stages grand enough to support his characters
private lives. The effect is to make epic adventures and internal
monologues one and the same thing.