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What to expect

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. An unlucky farm boy becomes the manservant of a French nobleman who’s as proud of having served with Joan of Arc as he’s aroused by slaughtering children. A free spirit tracks an ancient Shia sect, becoming 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 is complicit in his or her downfall and comes to learn that, in love, knowing better is never enough.

Critics Review

“Shepard’s cataclysmic renderings are both terrifying and awe-inspiring. There’s a word for that too—sublime.”

O, The Oprah Magazine

“Shepard’s use of relatively accurate biographical fact is bent to his own dramatic needs. Unlike memoirs that skew the truth, this is fiction that uses truth to warp into its own staged, often memoir-like reality.”

Chicago Tribune

“Each one of these eleven stories stands out for its masterly fusion of technique and subject.”

San Francisco Chronicle

“There is so much knowledge, insight, feeling, and artistry in each engrossing Shepard story, he must defy some law of literary physics.”

Booklist (starred review)

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