9. Like You'd Understand, Anyway

Like You'd Understand, Anyway
By Jim Shepard
Publisher: Knopf
224 pages
$23.00

Wildly inventive, and at the same time curiously dry and precise, Shepard's stories feel both minimalist and maximalist at the same time: minimal in their obsessive attention to historical detail, and enormous in their geographical scope and in the extreme emotions that the characters — cosmonauts, Victorian explorers, Texan football players, Aeschylus (yes, that Aeschylus) — cycle through. Shepard scours history and geography — from Chernobyl to Alaska to Tibet — in search of stages grand enough to support his characters private lives. The effect is to make epic adventures and internal monologues one and the same thing.