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Second Printing, October 2007. 211pp. [I include gratis a Knopf promotional sample of Jim Shepard's story "The Track of the Assassins" from You Think That's Bad.] Bright, clean & tight copy, unread, in AS NEW condition. "Following his widely acclaimed Project X and Love and Hydrogen--'Here is the effect of these two books,' wrote the Chicago Tribune: 'A reader finishes them buzzing with awe'--Jim Shepard now gives us his first entirely new collection in more than a decade. [] LIKE YOU'D UNDERSTAND, ANYWAY reaches from Chernobyl to Bridgeport, with a host of narrators only Shepard could bring to pitch-perfect life. Among them: a middle-aged Aeschylus at Marathon, still vying for parental approval. A maddeningly indefatigable Victorian explorer hauling his expedition, whaleboat and all, through the Great Australian Desert in midsummer. The first woman in space and her cosmonaut lover, caught in the star-crossed orbits of their joint mission. Two Texas high school football players at the top of their food chain, soliciting their fathers' attention by leveling everything before them on the field. And the rational and compassionate chief executioner of Paris, whose occupation, during the height of the Terror, eats away at all he holds dear. [] Brimming with irony, compassion, and withering humor, these eleven stories--at once eerily pertinent and dazzlingly exotic--showcase the work of a protean, prodigiously gifted writer at the height of his form. Reading Jim Shepard, according to Michael Chabon, 'is like encountering our national literature in microcosm.'" [jacket copy] "So varied in tone, theme, voice and setting are these stories that they might've been written by a hydra. A hydra, that is, surfeited with remarkable wit, compassion and the gift of gab."--Kirkus. "What's most remarkable about these stories, in the end, is how gently Shepard wraps the most extremely foreign and obscure events around emotional dilemmas common to all of us. . . The truth is we should understand this entire menagerie of characters. Scrape away the singular, perfectly detailed lives Shepard has given them and one thing is clear: They are us."--John Freeman, The Boston Globe. "Jim Shepard's access to different voices, social types, levels of experience, is truly astonishing. He has observed deeply, and his selection of detail from that observation is brilliant. This is the work of a deft, audacious artist."--Norman Rush. Pristine hardcover w/brilliant corners & crisp deckle edges, a square & tight binding, wrapped in a bright-as-new jacket w/the National Book Award Finalist sticker affixed.
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