Like You'd Understand, Anyway: Stories
by Jim Shepard
List Price:
Our Price: $7.97
You Save: $15.03 (65%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $1.36 (click here)
Category: Book
See more book details and other editions
Book Summary Information
Author: Jim ShepardEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Format: Deckle Edge
Published: 2007-09-25
ISBN: 0307265218
Number of pages: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Book Reviews of Like You'd Understand, Anyway: Stories
Book Review: Like you'd understand, anyway
Summary: 4 Stars
Like You'd Understand, Anyway is a collection of short stories written over a 4 year period by Jim Shepard, professor at Williams College in Massachusetts. The stories vary widely, but an underlying structure subtly peculates through, barely wetting our feet, inviting the curious to seek out the source of the spring. As Shepard says in an interview for the 2007 National Book Award nomination: "while lots of people have talked about how different my narratives and/or my narrative voices might be, the emotional preoccupations tend to be very similar. I probably obsess about the same five things, over and over."
The book is dedicated to Shepard's brother, and most of the stories explore brotherly relationships, in particular how "the past enters and floods our present" (p.140) - the football player in "Trample the Dead" who finds motivation in the pain of his past and future brother; the summer camp kid in "Courtesy for Beginners" whose brothers trauma inescapably creates his own nightmare. As the picture on the cover suggests, the more two brothers (or fathers and sons) struggle to achieve identity, the more their lives intertwine and become indistinguishable, driven by the "tsunami" of people and events outside their control.
As the self-referencing title of the book alludes, this is a somewhat post-modern book, the stories are not really about anything, they often end with no satisfying closure or even a discernible plot. Yet it is more than a self-conscious artsy exploration of post-modernism, its true value lays in how the subtle yet powerful stories come together to form a whole greater than its parts, and Shepard's uncanny ability to convincingly place the reader into the mind of anyone, anywhere. Shepard finds the smallest detail to bring alive a scene, time and place so that it convincingly reads like a non-fiction memoir. For example in the first story, "The Zero Meter Diving Team", about survivors of Chernobyl, Shepards "voice" is almost indistinguishable from real-life accounts such as those found in the non-fiction work Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster (2005).
There are no bad stories, but my favorites are "Trample the Dead" (high-school football), "Pleasure Boating in Lituya Bay" (1958 Alaskan tsunami), and "The First South Central Australian Expedition" (19th century Australian explorers). A book like this probably won't attract the typical non-fiction die-hard, but it could; most of the stories are based on historical incidents - there is a lengthy bibliography of non-fiction works used in its creation - and as all good fiction does, it explores the emotional side of things in a way non-fiction rarely achieves.
Summary of Like You'd Understand, Anyway: Stories
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 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.?
Short Stories Books
Book Subjects
- Arts & Photography
- Biographies & Memoirs
- Business & Investing
- Children's Books
- Comics & Graphic Novels
- Computers & Internet
- Cooking, Food & Wine
- Entertainment
- Gay & Lesbian
- Health, Mind & Body
- History
- Home & Garden
- Horror
- Law
- Literature & Fiction
- Mystery & Thrillers
- Nonfiction
- Outdoors & Nature
- Parenting & Families
- Professional & Technical
- Reference
- Religion & Spirituality
- Romance
- Science
- Science Fiction & Fantasy
- Sports
- Teens
- Travel
Most talked about in Short Stories Books
The Roald Dahl Treasuryby Roald Dahl
Jonathan Cape; Published: 1997; Hardcover; Book
The Red Pony (Twentieth-Century Classics)by John Steinbeck
Penguin Classics; Published: 1994-10-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $6.28
Price in other shops:
A Good Scent from a Strange Mountainby Robert Olen Butler
Penguin (Non-Classics); Published: 1993-06-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $1.15
Price in other shops:
Guys and Dolls: The Stories of Damon Runyonby Damon Runyon
Penguin (Non-Classics); Published: 1992-11-01; Mass Market Paperback; Book
Best price: $45.54
How We Are Hungryby Dave Eggers
PENGUIN; Published: 2006-02-23; Paperback; Book
Dressing Up for the Carnivalby Carol Shields
Penguin (Non-Classics); Published: 2001-05-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $0.79
Price in other shops:
East, Westby Salman Rushdie
Vintage Books; Published: 2006-10; Paperback; Book
Best price: $6.89
Price in other shops:
Local Girlsby Alice Hoffman
Vintage/Ebury (a Division of Random; Published: 2000-08; Paperback; Book
Best price: $5.25
Price in other shops:
Someone to Watch Over Me: Storiesby Richard Bausch
Harper Perennial; Published: 2000-05-03; Paperback; Book
Best price: $3.60
Price in other shops:
Faithless: Tales of Transgressionby Joyce Carol Oates
Ecco; Published: 2001-03-01; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $4.04
Price in other shops:
Similar Books and other products
Pulse: Storiesby Julian Barnes
Knopf; Published: 2011-05-03; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $6.50
Price in other shops:
AM/ PMby Amelia Gray
Featherproof Books; Published: 2009-08-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $7.69
Price in other shops:
The Pale Kingby David Foster Wallace
Little, Brown and Company; Published: 2011-04-15; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $13.99
Price in other shops:
Jesus' Son: Storiesby Denis Johnson
Picador; Published: 2009-02-17; Paperback; Book
Best price: $7.84
Price in other shops:
Desperate Characters: A Novelby Paula Fox
W. W. Norton & Company; Published: 1999-05-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $6.77
Price in other shops:
Half a Lifeby Darin Strauss
McSweeney's; Published: 2010-09-15; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $3.85
Price in other shops:
Train Dreams: A Novellaby Denis Johnson
Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Published: 2011-08-30; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $11.02
Price in other shops:
Project X: A Novelby Jim Shepard
Vintage; Published: 2005-04-12; Paperback; Book
Best price: $7.74
Price in other shops:
Love and Hydrogen: New and Selected Storiesby Jim Shepard
Vintage; Published: 2004-01-27; Paperback; Book
Best price: $8.82
Price in other shops:
You Think That's Bad: Storiesby Jim Shepard
Knopf; Published: 2011-03-22; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $14.51
Price in other shops: