Like You’d Understand, Anyway
Book | Jim Shepard
Legendary Greeks and young American geeks come alive under the masterful hand of Jim Shepard.
With a playwright's knack for nailing myriad voices and an historian's gift for researching a range of lives, Jim Shepard offers eleven extraordinary short fictions in his Story Prize-winning collection, Like You'd Understand, Anyway. Dexterously maneuvering between first-person narrators as varied as a Russian engineer, a young suburban kid, and a Victorian explorer, Shepard is at his best creating inexhaustible characters whose delusions shine through the stories they tell about their lives. A teenage football star sets up a masochistic training regimen for himself so he can beat the team he believes his estranged father's other son plays on. A Russian cosmonaut prepares to voyage into space to put herself within a two-kilometer range of her married crush. Aeschylus—as in the ancient Greek playwright—attempts to right the wrong of his brother's death. Yet no matter how distinct they are in time, location, or class, Shepard's characters desperately want some specific end, and their self-deceptions imbue their passionate pursuits with humor and heartache.
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