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Stories
Knopf
April 2011
On Sale: March 22, 2011
240 pages
ISBN: 0307594823
EAN: 9780307594822
Hardcover
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Fiction
Following Like You’d Understand, Anyway—awarded the Story
Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award—Jim Shepard
returns with an even more wildly diverse collection of
astonishingly observant stories. Like an expert curator, he
populates the vastness of human experience—from its bizarre
fringes and lonely, breathtaking pinnacles to the hopelessly
mediocre and desperately below average—with brilliant
scientists, reluctant soldiers, workaholic artists, female
explorers, depraved murderers, and deluded losers, all
wholly convincing and utterly fascinating. A “black world” operative at Los Alamos isn’t allowed to
tell his wife anything about his daily activities, but he
can’t resist sharing her intimate confidences with his work
buddy. A young Alpine researcher falls in love with the
girlfriend of his brother, who was killed in an avalanche he
believes he caused. An unlucky farm boy becomes the
manservant of a French nobleman who’s as proud of his
military service with Joan of Arc as he’s aroused by the
slaughter of children. A free-spirited autodidact, grieving
her lost sister, traces the ancient steps of a ruthless
Middle Eastern sect and becomes the first Western woman to
travel the Arabian deserts. From the inventor of the
Godzilla epics to a miserable G.I. in New Guinea, each comes
to realize that knowing better is never enough. Enthralling and unfailingly compassionate, You Think That’s
Bad traverses centuries, continents, and social strata, but
the joy and struggle that Shepard depicts with such
devastating sensitivity—all the heartbreak, alienation,
intimacy, and accomplishment—has a universal resonance.
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