The World to Come

January 2, 2017
In his latest collection, Shepard (The Book of Aron) continues to spin historical yarns, bouncing from the Minoan civilization of 1600 B.C.E. to the 21st-century United States, and the results are rewarding. The incredible “Safety Tips for Living Alone” recounts the fate of a doomed U.S. Air Force radar station, Texas Tower #4, lost to a winter storm in 1961, via the experiences of workers aboard and their wives safely ashore. More men are trapped in the harrowing “HMS Terror,” which follows an English expedition of arctic waters, as well as in “Telemachus,” a WWII story that takes place inside a claustrophobic English T-class submarine patrolling Far Eastern waters. The collection’s detailed, heartbreaking title story suggests a different kind of imprisonment, as neighboring housewives attempt to forge a taboo loving relationship while isolated on the 19th-century American frontier, while Shepard’s more contemporary tales focus on the quarantine-like effects of depression and family feuds. Throughout, the author immerses the reader in the minds of his characters, often structuring narratives in epistolary fashion, and returns to quirks—several characters fall in love with cousins, for example—to provide the collection a threaded cohesion.

Starred review from December 15, 2016
Shepard's fifth story collection--his first book since his well-received novel, The Book of Aron (2015), which was a Kirkus Prize finalist--demonstrates why he's a writer who defies categorization. An extended bibliography shows just how meticulous Shepard's research is, as usual. There's nothing confessional in his work, no possibility of confusing the author with his protagonists, who include a frontier housewife in a loveless marriage (the title story), a French balloonist in the 18th century who is as impractical as he is imaginative ("The Ocean of Air"), and a British submariner in World War II "immersed in a haze of inertia" ("Telemachus"). Some of his stories take the form of diaries, and he writes in the language and cadence of the period, suggesting an occasional stylistic affinity with Conrad and Melville. Yet these aren't historical fictions or period pieces but meditations on the past as prologue, on seeing the world to come (as the title has it) in the world that has been. This world is one in which impersonal bureaucracy trumps individual initiative at every turn, whether Shepard is writing about the seemingly predestined collapse of an Air Force information tower ("Safety Tips for Living Alone"), illuminating "the state of most of our railway infrastructure, which on a good day can look like the shittiest Third World footings and tracks on a bad day" ("Positive Train Control," which has pages that read like investigative journalism), or a doomed 19th-century seafaring exploration ("HMS Terror"). In addition to institutional forces, fate and nature make humanity seem very small in these stories; so many of their protagonists are somehow feckless and hapless as they try to find some semblance of a lifeline in the most tenuous connections, in what the final story terms, with a tinge of irony, "the silver lining of their intimacy." A stylist whose fictional expansiveness underscores his singularity.

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Starred review from January 1, 2017
Shepard, a fiction writer with a remarkably intimate approach to historical subjects, returns to the short story following his novel, The Book of Aron (2015), winner of the PEN New England Award and the Sophie Brody Medal for Excellence in Jewish Literature, and a Carnegie Medal finalist. In this collection of 10 exceptionally powerful tales of courageous responsibility and criminal indifference set in the past and present, Shepard creates various states of emergency either diligently recorded in journals or conveyed in high-velocity, dialogue-driven dramas. With wit and compassion, he fictionalizes the doomed Arctic Franklin Expedition and the 1961 destruction by a violent storm of a precariously erected, manned radar tower off the East Coast. He tells the stories of imperiled crew members on a WWII submarine and two men on an overloaded, under-inspected oil train heading for disaster. Shepard's fascination with technology also fuels a sweetly droll tale about the eighteenth-century French Montgolfier brothers and their hot-air balloons. In the heartbreaking title story, Shepard choreographs a slow domestic disaster in 1850s New England, where two lonely farm women discover a dangerous passion. Throughout this masterful, profoundly involving collection, Shepard elucidates with stirring precision the emotions of characters ambushed by terrifying powers beyond their control, whether a blizzard or an earthquake, the death of a child, or forbidden love.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

October 1, 2016

Much loved by the library world, Shepard's The Book of Aron was proclaimed a 2016 ALA Notable Book and winner of the Sophie Brody Medal for Excellence in Jewish Literature and was also short-listed for the 2016 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. This fifth story collection shows Shepard working in a genre he's mastered; 2007's Like You'd Understand, Anyway, won the Story Prize and was nominated for a National Book Award. Here are stories channeling the voices of English Arctic explorers, 18th-century French balloonists, 19th-century housewives, and a young American managing the dangers of our crude-oil trains. With a six-city tour.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from February 15, 2017

With the release of his fifth story collection, Shepard (You Think That's Bad; The Book of Aron) continues to weave interlacing narrative threads that imaginatively evoke time and place. Thematically, the ten stories in this collection illuminate both the comedy and the tragedy of humanity's tethering to the vagaries of the universe. Whether it's soldiers marooned on a radar station in the Atlantic Ocean or the racing mind of a parent moments before a tsunami destroys Crete in 365 CE, each of the tales in this collection re-creates the human circumstances around largely forgotten events. In the title story, the author beautifully narrates a tragic love story through a series of diary entries that presage the ungovernability of both the weather and the heart's desires. Every page is a disturbing reminder that control is a mere illusion we employ to salve our consciences. VERDICT Shepard's ability to rotate the masks of comedy and tragedy in a single story while poetically blending fact and fiction is on full display in this collection. [See Prepub Alert, 8/26/16.]--Joshua Finnell, Los Alamos National Lab., NM

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 15, 2017

With the release of his fifth story collection, Shepard (You Think That's Bad; The Book of Aron) continues to weave interlacing narrative threads that imaginatively evoke time and place. Thematically, the ten stories in this collection illuminate both the comedy and the tragedy of humanity's tethering to the vagaries of the universe. Whether it's soldiers marooned on a radar station in the Atlantic Ocean or the racing mind of a parent moments before a tsunami destroys Crete in 365 CE, each of the tales in this collection re-creates the human circumstances around largely forgotten events. In the title story, the author beautifully narrates a tragic love story through a series of diary entries that presage the ungovernability of both the weather and the heart's desires. Every page is a disturbing reminder that control is a mere illusion we employ to salve our consciences. VERDICT Shepard's ability to rotate the masks of comedy and tragedy in a single story while poetically blending fact and fiction is on full display in this collection. [See Prepub Alert, 8/26/16.]--Joshua Finnell, Los Alamos National Lab., NM

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.