Jim Shepard

Aron and a handful of boys and girls in the Warsaw Ghetto smuggle and trade things through the "quarantine walls" to keep their people alive until he is rescued by a Jewish-Polish doctor and advocate of children's rights who instills within him the importance of letting the world know the atrocities they have all suffered at the hands of the enemy.

The Book of Aron

A spare and gripping novel about the next pandemic--completed by the award-winning Jim Shepard before COVID-19 even emerged--that reads like a fictional sequel to our current crisis. In a tiny settlement on the west coast of Greenland, 11-year-old Aleq and his best friend, frequent trespassers at a mining site exposed to mountains of long-buried and thawing permafrost, carry what they pick up back into their village, and from there Shepard's harrowing and deeply moving story follows Aleq, one of the few survivors of the initial outbreak, through his identification and radical isolation as the likely index patient. While he shoulders both a crushing guilt for what he may have done and the hopes of a world looking for answers, we also meet two Epidemic Intelligence Service investigators dispatched from the CDC--Jeannine, an epidemiologist and daughter of Algerian immigrants, and Danice, an M.D. and lab wonk. As they attempt to head off the cataclysm, Jeannine--moving from the Greeland hospital overwhelmed with the first patients to a Level 4 high-security facility in the Rocky Mountains--does what she can to sustain Aleq. Both a chamber piece of multiple intimate perspectives and a more omniscient glimpse into the megastructures (political, cultural, and biological) that inform such a disaster, the novel reminds us of the crucial bonds that form in the midst of catastrophe, as a child and several hypereducated adults learn what it means to provide adequate support for those they love. In the process, they celebrate the precious worlds they might lose, and help to shape others that may survive.

A Novel

Phase Six

A volume of short tales by a National Book Award-finalist author features such protagonists as the inventor of the Godzilla epics and an operative who discloses his wife's secrets when he cannot share his own.

Stories

You Think That's Bad

"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.

The World to Come

Like You'd Understand, Anyway

A new collection of short fiction encompasses both previously unpublished stories, as well as selections from The New Yorker, Playboy, and other magazines and fourteen works from Battling Against Castro and other anthologies.

New and Selected Stories

Love & Hydrogen

Lauren Groff

Deborah Eisenberg

Alice Munro

Edith Pearlman

Presents a collection of short stories judged to be the best in America and Canada for 2012, along with essays by three distinguished writers and jurors on their favorite pieces.

The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013

Presents eleven stories that range across time and geography to offer portraits of the first woman in space, an executioner in Revolutionary Paris whose job forces a crisis in conscience, and a middle-aged Aeschylus still seeking parental approval.

Hanratty and his only friend, Flake, struggle to deal with the nightmare of junior high school--bullying, girls who taunt them, jocks who beat them up, a creepy old man who stalks them, and a disaffected sixth grader who adores them--until their demoralization is transformed into a growing yearning for a deadly revenge. Reprint. 10,000 first printing.

Project X

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 publications ranging from McSweeney’s to The New Yorker to Harper’s to Tin House—encompass in theme and compassion what an ordinary writer would seem to need several lifetimes to imagine. A frustrated wife makes use of an enterprising illegal-gun salesman to hold her husband hostage; two hapless adult-education students botch their attempts at rudimentary piano but succeed in a halting, awkward romance; a fascinated and murderous Creature welcomes the first human visitors to his Black Lagoon; and in the title story, the stupefyingly huge airship Hindenburg flies to its doom, representing in 1937 mankind's greatest yearning as well as its titanic failure. Generous in scope and astonishing in ambition, Shepard’s voice never falters; the virtuosity of Love and Hydrogen cements his reputation as, in the words of Rick Bass, “a passionate writer with a razor-sharp wit and an elephantine heart”—in short, one of the most powerful talents at work today.

Love and Hydrogen

a novel

Nosferatu

essays on movies and politics

The tunnel at the end of the light

The acclaimed National Book Award finalist—“one of the United States’ finest writers,” according to Joshua Ferris, “full of wit, humanity, and fearless curiosity”—now gives us a novel that will join the short list of classics about children caught up in the Holocaust. Aron, the narrator, is an engaging if peculiar and unhappy young boy whose family is driven by the German onslaught from the Polish countryside into Warsaw and slowly battered by deprivation, disease, and persecution. He and a handful of boys and girls risk their lives by scuttling around the ghetto to smuggle and trade contraband through the quarantine walls in hopes of keeping their fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters alive, hunted all the while by blackmailers and by Jewish, Polish, and German police, not to mention the Gestapo. When his family is finally stripped away from him, Aron is rescued by Janusz Korczak, a doctor renowned throughout prewar Europe as an advocate of children’s rights who, once the Nazis swept in, was put in charge of the Warsaw orphanage. Treblinka awaits them all, but does Aron manage to escape—as his mentor suspected he could—to spread word about the atrocities? Jim Shepard has masterfully made this child’s-eye view of the darkest history mesmerizing, sometimes comic despite all odds, truly heartbreaking, and even inspiring. Anyone who hears Aron’s voice will remember it forever.

A novel

Amy Hempel

An entertaining anthology of poetry, written from the canine point of view, encompasses the contributions of William Wegman, Rick Bass, Susan Minot, Edward Albee, John Irving, Cynthia Heimel, Thom Gunn, and other notable writers. Reprint. 17,500 first printing.

Poems by Writers' Dogs

Unleashed

Anthony Doerr

Milan Kundera

Anthony Swofford

Stuart Dybek

Ron Carlson

Charlie Smith

Tara Ison

The literary magazine people are talking about

Tin House

Mary Ruefle

Hollis Seamon

John Crowley

Jeffrey Ford

Kij Johnson

Sofia Samatar

Paul Di Filippo

Akiko Busch

John Seven

Sonia Sanchez

Karin Lowachee

Paul Park

Sarena Ulibarri

Gregory Scheckler

Izzy Wasserstein

Renee Simms

Safia Elhillo

Simone Muench

Tina Connolly

Jorie Graham

Kirsten Imani Kasai

Sara St. Antoine

Karen Shepard

Unoma Azuah

Andrea Martinez Corbin

Shawn Frazier

Christine Poreba

Jennifer Rapaport

Erin Roberts

Marjorie Thomsen

anthology of fine art images from Laura Christensen, and fiction and poetry from numerous authors

Vintage Photography Reimagined by One Artist and Thirty Writers

Then Again

Sare St. Antoine

anthology of fine art images from Laura Christensen, and fiction and poetry from numerous authors -- compared to the larger THEN AGAIN featuring over thirty authors, THEN AGAIN Remix is a smaller edition containing works by ten authors.

Vintage Photography Reimagined by One Artist and Ten Writers

Then Again (Remix)

Chwytająca za serce powieść o chłopcu, który trafia pod skrzydła Janusza Korczaka Wzruszający obraz Holokaustu przedstawiony oczami dziecka. „Arcydzieło”. The Washington Post Ośmioletni Aron wraz z rodziną przeprowadza się z małej polskiej wioski do zatłoczonej Warszawy. Ojciec podejmuje pracę w fabryce, a chłopiec zaprzyjaźnia się z Lutkiem, który zdradza mu tajemnice podwórkowego życia. Szanse na szczęście przekreśla wybuch II wojny światowej. Opaski z gwiazdą Dawida, kradzieże i strach przed niemieckimi mundurami stają się codziennością, a wkrótce cały świat Arona zamyka się w ciasnych murach getta. By przeżyć, chłopiec musi podejmować okrutne decyzje – z wagi których często nawet nie zdaje sobie sprawy. Gdy traci bliskich, trafia pod opiekę Janusza Korczaka, który na nowo budzi w nim człowieczeństwo.

Księga Arona

Now in paperback, an irresistible gift for dog lovers: poems from the dogs' point of view, written by the well known writers and poets who love them. List of contributors: Edward Albee, Jennifer Allen, Danny Anderson, Lynda Barry, Rick Bass, Charles Baxter, Robert Benson, Roy Blount, Jr., Ron Carlson, Jill Ciment, Bernard Cooper, Stephen Dobyns, Mark Doty, Stephen Dunn, Anderson Ferrell, Amy Gerstler, Matthew Graham, Ron Hansen, Brooks Haxton, Cynthia Heimel, Amy Hempel, Noy Hollan, Andrew Hudgins, John Irving, Denis Johnson, R.S. Jones, Walter Kirn, Sheila Kohler, Maxine Kumin, Natalie Kusz, Anne Lamott, Gordon Lish, Ralph Lombreglia, Merrill Markoe, Pearson Marx, Erin McGraw, Heather McHugh, Arthur Miller, George Minot, Susan Minot, Honor Moore, Mary Morris, Alicia Muñoz, Elise Paschen, Padgett Powell, Wyatt Prunty, Lawrence Raab, Mark Richard, John Rybicki, Jeanne Schinto, Bob Shacochis, Jim Shepard, Karen Shepard, Lee Smith, Ben Sonnenberg, Kate Clark Spencer, Gerald Stern, Terese Svoboda, William Tester, Abigail Thomas, Lily Tuck, Sidney Wade, Kathryn Walker, William Wegman

Jim Shepard

Books

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