It took me a moment to get into Kiss of the Wolf although I already had read enough of Shepard's shorter stories to know I liked his writing style. I think the problem was my inability to connect with his characters early on. Indeed, even by the end of KotW, I still felt that these people were ...
After Shepard's exhilarating first novel, Flights, this book comes as something of a disappointment. Set during World War II, it is the curiously static story of a bomber crew stationed in England. Though Shepard goes to great lengths in delineating a realistic portrait of these men, the book nev...
In the aftermath of the Columbine High School Shootings in 1999, countless reporters and commentators repeated similar versions of the same phrase over and over again: "People are wondering how something like this could happen."Jim Shepard knows.Project X is one of the few books that has ever hon...
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-clos...
"Take for example the prisoner who was sitting here yesterday recording the session. What he intuited some time a go was that there was nothing a man wouldn't do to save himself, and having saved himself, there was nothing he wouldn't do for increasingly tirvial reasons, and that eventually he fi...
It was on Sienna Street facing the wall, as far south as you could go. One of the kids said they’d had to move again in October when the ghetto had gotten even smaller. Korczak and the heavy woman Stefa washed me. He said while they were doing it that he’d never seen such a dirty chest and armpit...
The smaller Xiphactinus are three times your length and swallow their prey whole. They’re gill-to-gill with Cretoxyrhina, great white sharks fifty feet long with heads the size of Mini Coopers and twelve-inch nightmare triangles of teeth. Mosasaurs big and small, the runts weighing in at two tons...
I’d been alone for somewhere between 250 and 260 million years. I’d forgotten the exact date. Our prime had been the Devonian, and we’d been old news by the Permian. We’d become a joke by the Triassic and fish food by the Cretaceous. The Cenozoic had dragged by like the eon it was. At some point ...