Showing results by author "Jim Shepard" in All Categories

The 1935 Labor Day hurricane annihilated between four hundred and six hundred lives in the middle of the Florida Keys, and like all disasters, both exposed long-standing social and economic inequities and reminded us of the bonds that enable us to provide what rescue we can for those we cherish. In this fictional account of the storm, rooted in the record but brought to life with Shepard’s unparalleled command of interpersonal impact, Village of Islands follows a handful of residents of a small beachside town in the moments leading up to, during and after this event.

This "novel of contagion and collapse is also the story of love’s 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...

In Safety Tips for Living Alone, Jim Shepard weaves the stories of four families whose lives are upended when the men go to work on a dangerous and isolated surveillance platform off the coast of Long Island. After working his way up to captain, career serviceman Gordon Phelan is offered the command of Texas Tower 4--a wobbly "box over the ocean".

The acclaimed National Book Award finalist—“one of the United States’ finest writers,” according to Joshua Ferris, “full of wit, humanity, and fearless curiosity”—now gives us a novel that will join the short list of classics about children caught up in the Holocaust. Aron, the...

Culling the vastness of experience--from its bizarre fringes and breathtaking pinnacles to the mediocre and desperately below average--like an expert curator, Jim Shepard populates this collection with characters at once wildly diverse and wholly fascinating. A "black world" operative can't tell his wife a word about his daily activities, but doesn't resist sharing her confidences. A young Alpine researcher is smitten by the girlfriend of his dead brother, killed in an avalanche he believes he caused.

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 “Jim Shepard is a fantastic writer—compassionate, funny, and fearless—[whose...