Shepard Jim Скачать все книги 8 Количество книг

A New York Times Notable Book: A lethal accident turns life into a waking nightmare for a mother and her son in this gripping novel of secrecy and dread.

Abandoned by her husband, Joanie Mucherino and her eleven-year-old son, Todd, struggle to cope while dealing with their comically tactless and intrusive Italian family. Further complicating things, Joanie now seems available to Bruno Minea, an old family friend whose two-decade passion for her has been unwavering and faintly frightening. When Joanie and Todd kill an acquaintance in a hit-and-run accident, they soon discover — to their horror — that they’re keeping it a secret. But as the weight of their lies becomes more than they can can bear, their crime connects them to something even more sinister, as the victim had powerful, dangerous friends who will go to great lengths to avenge his death.

Part family drama, part thriller, exemplifies the talents of National Book Award finalist Jim Shepard, author of 2015 favorite , who crafts hilarious, spot-on dialogue with the same mastery he lends to the ingenious, page-turning plot, in which a loving mother is forced to confront her role as the architect of her son’s anguished guilt.

During the air war over Germany, the crew of a B-17 Flying Fortress tries to achieve some competence as a unit before their most catastrophic mission yet.

They call their plane “Paper Doll,” the joke being its suggestion of flimsiness, inconsequence, and perishability, and none of them, from the veterans to the newcomers, feel the bravery they’d like to project. But now, despite their myriad limitations, they’ve been tasked with living through the tension and boredom of base life, saving one another’s lives, and rejoicing at those missions they’ve survived — until they’re confronted by the shock of a mission directed against the ball-bearing factories in Schweinfurt, a mission that will outfly the capacities of their fighter escorts and take them hundreds of miles through the most heavily defended sectors of the German Air Defense.

National Book Award finalist and author of Jim Shepard brilliantly illustrates both the lunacy and intimacy of these young men’s lives on the ground as well as their growing disillusionment and terror at what lies ahead. Unsentimental and unsparing in its honesty, portrays with stirring clarity the realities of war and the bonds forged in the face of death.

Following —awarded the Story Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award — Jim Shepard returns with an even more wildly diverse collection of astonishingly observant stories. Like an expert curator, he populates the vastness of human experience — from its bizarre fringes and lonely, breathtaking pinnacles to the hopelessly mediocre and desperately below average — with brilliant scientists, reluctant soldiers, workaholic artists, female explorers, depraved murderers, and deluded losers, all wholly convincing and utterly fascinating.

A “black world” operative at Los Alamos isn’t allowed to tell his wife anything about his daily activities, but he can’t resist sharing her intimate confidences with his work buddy. A young Alpine researcher falls in love with the girlfriend of his brother, who was killed in an avalanche he believes he caused. An unlucky farm boy becomes the manservant of a French nobleman who’s as proud of his military service with Joan of Arc as he’s aroused by the slaughter of children. A free-spirited autodidact, grieving her lost sister, traces the ancient steps of a ruthless Middle Eastern sect and becomes 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 comes to realize that knowing better is never enough.

Enthralling and unfailingly compassionate, traverses centuries, continents, and social strata, but the joy and struggle that Shepard depicts with such devastating sensitivity — all the heartbreak, alienation, intimacy, and accomplishment — has a universal resonance.

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 sister hates everyone, including him; his sprawling Italian family, when it comes to emotional matters, has the touch of a blacksmith; and his Catholic school education provides a ready framework against which he can measure himself as continually falling short of the ideal. As his grades slip and his family begins to come apart, Biddy searches for a focus and finds one during a trip in a family friend’s private plane: To rise above his troubles, he’s going to have to learn to fly.

Biddy resolves to steal the plane, having taught himself as a pilot through manuals and observation, and as he moves through the progressions of his plan, he slowly develops the confidence and independence he’s going to need later in life. In this compassionate and honest portrait of the challenges, missteps, and small successes of adolescence, Biddy is an unforgettable character whose problems might seem common but whose solutions are often extraordinary.

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 narrator, 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. He and a handful of boys and girls risk their lives by scuttling around the ghetto to smuggle and trade contraband through the quarantine walls in hopes of keeping their fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters alive, hunted all the while by blackmailers and by Jewish, Polish, and German police, not to mention the Gestapo.

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 children’s rights who, once the Nazis swept in, was put in charge of the Warsaw orphanage. Treblinka awaits them all, but does Aron manage to escape — as his mentor suspected he could — to spread word about the atrocities?

Jim Shepard has masterfully made this child's-eye view of the darkest history mesmerizing, sometimes comic despite all odds, truly heartbreaking, and even inspiring. Anyone who hears Aron's voice will remember it forever.

Following his widely acclaimed and —“Here is the effect of these two books,” wrote the “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

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.”

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. But both Leda and Albert lead him into increasingly proscribed areas of thought and speech, and thus into conflict with a newly ascendant party that intends to prosecute a border war against an officially despised ethnic group and criminalize dissent. Citizens have been disappearing and surveillance in the name of safety has become all-pervasive. When Kehr, a special assistant of the civil guard, billets himself at Karel’s house for unknown reasons, Karel finds his already tenuous hold on his own innocence crushed as Kehr — tribune, inquisitor, and metaphysician of terror — instructs his unwilling protégé in those moments when history is let off the leash.

Lights Out in the Reptile House

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, and at home, until an unthinkable idea offers them a spectacular and terrifying release.

From Jim Shepard, one of the most enduring and influential novelists writing today, comes an unflinching look into the heart and soul of adolescence. Tender and horrifying, prescient and moving, will not easily be forgotten.