JIM SHEPARD

"Jim Shepard is a fiction writer of peculiar but tantalizing gifts."The New York TimesIn 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 Shepards 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 MD and lab wonk. As they attempt to head off the cataclysm, Jeannine--moving from the Greenland 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 hyper-educated 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.

Traduit de langlais (États-Unis) par Madeleine Nasalik." Aron, cest le nom que mes parents mont donné, mais mon père dit quils auraient mieux fait de mappeler "Dans quoi tu tes encore fourré. " Aron

The acclaimed National Book Award finalistone of the United States finest writers, according to Joshua Ferris, full of wit, humanity, and fearless curiositynow 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 childrens rights who, once the Nazis swept in, was put in charge of the Warsaw orphanage. Treblinka awaits them all, but does Aron manage to escapeas his mentor suspected he couldto spread word about the atrocities? Jim Shepard has masterfully made this childs-eye view of the darkest history mesmerizing, sometimes comic despite all odds, truly heartbreaking, and even inspiring. Anyone who hears Arons voice will remember it forever. From the Hardcover edition.

Small and sullen, Aron is eight years old when his family moves from a rural Polish village to hectic Warsaw. At first gradually and then ever more quickly, his familys opportunities for a better life vanish as the occupying German government imposes harsh restrictions. Officially confined to the Jewish quarter, with hunger, vermin, disease and death all around him, Aron makes his way from apprentice to master smuggler until finally, with everyone for whom he cared stripped away from him, his only option is Janusz Korczak, the renowned doctor, childrens rights advocate, and radio host who runs a Jewish orphanage. And Korczak in turn awakens the humanity inside the boy.

Traduit de langlais (États-Unis) par Madeleine Nasalik." Aron, cest le nom que mes parents mont donné, mais mon père dit quils auraient mieux fait de mappeler "Dans quoi tu tes encore fourré. " Aron

Bajo la pancarta que da la bienvenida a los nuevos alumnos de octavo curso hay un letrero que dice: NINGÚN ALUMNO FRACASADO y un folleto que ofrece OCHO MANERAS DE SER INTELIGENTE. Para el adolescente Edwin Hanratty, a menudo tan hilarante como desdichado, esto forma parte de todo aquello que convierte la escuela de secundaria en una especie de pesadilla implacable. Y asi, junto con Flake, su unico amigo, pugna con una pandilla tras otra -los deportistas que les dan una paliza, las chicas que les ignoran o les ridiculizan-, asi como con las atenciones obstinadas y desconcertantes de un crio de sexto curso mas marginado aun que ellos. Y aunque los padres de Edwin se esfuerzan por comprenderle, el y su amigo Flake se enfrentan a una desmoralizacion tan absoluta que no tienen otro refugio mas que sus propias observaciones amargas e incisivas sobre todo lo que les rodea. Hasta que paulatinamente comienzan a coquetear con la mas horrible de las venganzas, una venganza que nadie olvidara contra los compañeros y profesores de su escuela. Este impulso letal, que tantas veces ha conmocionado a la sociedad estadounidense (especialmente desde la matanza de Columbine que inspiro tanto las peliculas de Michael Moore y Gus Van Sant como esta novela de Jim Shepard) nunca ha sido objeto de una credibilidad tan espeluznante como en Proyecto X, que sugiere que el principal dilema de estos muchachos no es tanto su odio hacia el mundo como su atormentado y constante amor por el.

A Vintage Shorts Short Story Month SelectionVelibor Vasovic is not political. He is a soccer player; has played for Partizan Belgrade and his national team. Scored Partizans only goal against Real Madrid in the European Cup. He is the rock supporting any defense. But in 1966, he starts playing for Ajax Amsterdam, firmly in the West. And politics catches up to him. Jim Shepard is the wildly inventive guru of the historical fiction short story; a finalist for the National Book Award, and one of the United States finest writers (Joshua Ferris). Ajax Is All About Attack is classic Shepard, from the collection Love and Hydrogen. An eBook short.

Warsaw, Poland, 1939. My mother and father named me Aron, but my father said they should have named me What Have You Done or What Were You Thinking.Aron is a nine-year-old Polish Jew, and a troublemaker. As the walls go up around the ghetto in Warsaw, as the lice and typhus rage, food is stolen and even Jewish police betray their people, Aron smuggles from the other side to survive. In a place where no one thinks of anyone but himself, the only exception is Doctor Korczak; childrens rights activist and embattled orphanage director. They call the Doctor a hero. Aron is not a hero. He is not special or selfless or spirited. He is ordinary. He is willing to do what the Doctor will not.

Following Like Youd Understand, Anywayawarded the Story Prize and a finalist for the National Book AwardJim Shepard returns with an even more wildly diverse collection of astonishingly observant stories. Like an expert curator, he populates the vastness of human experiencefrom its bizarre fringes and lonely, breathtaking pinnacles to the hopelessly mediocre and desperately below averagewith 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 isnt allowed to tell his wife anything about his daily activities, but he cant 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 whos as proud of his military service with Joan of Arc as hes 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 Thats Bad traverses centuries, continents, and social strata, but the joy and struggle that Shepard depicts with such devastating sensitivityall the heartbreak, alienation, intimacy, and accomplishmenthas a universal resonance.

In the wilderness of junior high, Edwin Hanratty is at the bottom of the food chain. His teachers find him a nuisance. His fellow students consider him prey. And although his parents are not oblivious to his troubles, they cant quite bring themselves to fathom the ruthless forces that demoralize him daily. Sharing in these schoolyard indignities is his only friend, Flake. Branded together as misfits, their fury simmers quietly in the hallways, classrooms, and at home, until an unthinkable idea offers them a spectacular and terrifying release.From Jim Shepard, one of the most enduring and influential novelists writing today, comes an unflinching look into the heart and soul of adolescence. Tender and horrifying, prescient and moving, Project X will not easily be forgotten.

Ive 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 Id 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 Hydrogenfamiliar to readers from publications ranging from McSweeneys to TheNew Yorker to Harpers to Tin Houseencompass 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 mankinds greatest yearning as well as its titanic failure. Generous in scope and astonishing in ambition, Shepards 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 heartin short, one of the most powerful talents at work today.

Following his widely acclaimed Project X and Love and HydrogenHere is the effect of these two books, wrote the Chicago Tribune: A reader finishes them buzzing with aweJim Shepard now gives us his first entirely new collection in more than a decade.Like Youd 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 taking his place 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 are at once eerily pertinent and dazzlingly exotic, and they 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.

This "novel of contagion and collapse is also the story of loves unlikely survival in the most hostile conditions (Karen Russell, bestselling author of Swamplandia!)from the National Book Award-nominated author of The Book of Aron.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 Shepards 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.

The acclaimed National Book Award finalistone of the United States finest writers, according to Joshua Ferris, full of wit, humanity, and fearless curiositynow 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 childrens rights who, once the Nazis swept in, was put in charge of the Warsaw orphanage. Treblinka awaits them all, but does Aron manage to escapeas his mentor suspected he couldto spread word about the atrocities? Jim Shepard has masterfully made this childs-eye view of the darkest history mesmerizing, sometimes comic despite all odds, truly heartbreaking, and even inspiring. Anyone who hears Arons voice will remember it forever.

A fantastic writer - compassionate, funny and fearless George SaundersOne of the USs finest writers according to Joshua Ferris, Jim Shepard now delivers a new collection that spans borders and centuries with unrivalled mastery. These ten stories ring with voices as diverse as those belonging to Arctic explorers in historys most nightmarish expedition, the Montgolfier brothers competing to be the first man to fly, and two American frontierswomen whose passionate connection is severed by jealous husbands and a deadly snowstorm.In each case the personal is the political as these humans, while falling in love or negotiating marital pitfalls or simply coming to terms with their own failings, face the tidal wave of natures indifference and cruelty. History has swept them from our sympathy; Jim Shepard has reached into the past and sought them out.In his first collection to be published in the UK, this celebrated master of the short story displays his formidable acuity in imagining these wildly different worlds, and what our various lives feel like in the grip of catastrophe.

Eleven short masterworks from this great American writer of catastrophe fiction, in which lives are upended as much by broken hearts as by collapsing dams, vainglorious wars, gargantuan wildfires, and shipwrecks"Built on twin foundations of nostalgia for the never-was, and of that millennial American optimism that is indistinguishable from despair." Michael Chabon on Jim Shepards short stories"A deft, audacious artist." Norman Rush, National Book Award-winning author of MatingAcross centuries and wildly diverse locations, Shepard holds us in his grip. We witness the devastating 1935 Labor Day hurricane in Florida from multiple points of view, read the 1864 letters between Lucy in Boone, NC (Three privates are currently sleeping soundly on our porch in their muddy blankets) and her great love William, on the march in Tennessee (I cant write much for it seems we are looking for a fight every minute), and in the title story, meet the stubborn Constance, who had no gift for flirtation with men, preferring Minna, her best friend and queen of bad influences as their devotion unfolds in part on the doomed liner Lusitania.With irony, compassion, and withering humor, these stories evoke the terrible ease with which catastrophe, human-engineered or otherwise, can sweep away all we find most precious and expose those limitations weve refused to address. At the same time, Shepard raises up what is best in us: the love and friendships that sustain, and the consolations and sacrifices we provide one another on a beleaguered planet.

Bursting with wicked humor and driven by an incomparable understanding of what it means to be human, The World to Come is the inimitable work of the most ambitious story writer in America (The Daily Beast).Now a major motion pictureShepard traverses both borders and centuries, seamlessly inhabiting a multitude of disparate men and women, and giving voice to visionaries, pioneers, and secret misfitsfrom nineteenth-century explorers departing on one of the Arctics most nightmarish expeditions to twentieth-century American military wives maintaining hope at home. Shepards characters confront everything from the emotional pitfalls of everyday life to colossal catastrophes, battling natural forces, the hazards of new technology, and their own implacable shortcomings. "[Shepard] has a knack for compressing a novels worth of life into 30 or 40 pages. The Boston Globe

A Segunda Guerra Mundial vista pelos olhos de um garoto no gueto de Varsóvia.Em meio à guerra que assola a Europa, uma família é arrastada de sua casa no interior da Polônia até Varsóvia, um caldeirã