Jim Shepard

"Aron, [a child living in World War II Poland], 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 ... 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...

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...

A shy and apolitical herpetologist-in-training finds the weight of history bearing down on him as the effects of repression ramp up in his country In an unspecified country that combines elements of Chile under its military regime, South Africa under apartheid, and Italy under fascism, fifteen-year-old Karel Roeder asks only to be left alone to learn from Albert, his mentor at the zoo's reptile house, and to devote himself to his girlfriend, Leda....

A thirteen-year-old hatches a plan of escape, solace, and utter independence through a dream of flight that's both literal and figurative in this engrossing novel by National Book Award finalist Jim Shepard As beset by the world as any thirteen-year-old-and maybe a little more so-Biddy Siebert does his best to negotiate both the intimacies and isolations of his world and his own maddening and slightly comical idiosyncrasies. His ferocious younger...

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 can't 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,...

The story, Reach for the Sky, is on the life of a worker in a home for abandoned dogs, while in Who We Are, What We're Doing, a fighter pilot considers pulling eight G's, "the real thing, the difference between thinking about kissing and kissing."

Somewhere along the mid-nineteenth century American East Coast frontier, two neighboring couples battle hardship and isolation, witnessed by a splendid yet testing landscape, challenging them both physically and psychologically.