Coffee House after hours : Author Jim Shepard
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About the Event
Coffee House Club invites acclaimed author Jim Shepard to the Salmagundi Club to read from and discuss his new story collection, The Queen of Bad Influences.
About the Book
In a dozen bravura historical short stories, Shepard (Phase Six, 2021) again summons his rare and prodigious gift for imagining the thoughts and feelings of people caught in catastrophes. Ardent research provides the facts; empathy and literary prowess transmute them into tales of nearly overwhelming intensity. In each, Shepard deftly sketches characters of sharp wit, emotional complexity, distinct intelligence, candor, and courage. Starving veterans are transported to Florida during the Great Depression to build a highway only to be caught in a horrendously devastating hurricane. Ed Pulaski was excited to join the new Forestry Service, then nearly dies saving lives during the monstrous 1910 Devil’s Broom wildfire in Idaho and Montana.
Shepard dramatizes the hubris behind the dam failure that precipitated the infamous 1889 Jonestown Flood in Pennsylvania. The folly and tragedies of war are conveyed through letters between men on the front lines and women battling for everyday existence on the home front during the Civil War and WWI. Shepard portrays a young courting couple as the Boston Tea Party escalates the American Revolution. And in the title story, a young woman loses her soul mate in the sinking of the Lusitania. These magnificent, all-consuming stories of unflinching precision, breathtaking artistry, deep compassion, and lifeline humor pit the merciless might of nature against the transcendence of love.
— Donna Seaman
About the Speaker
Jim Shepard has written eight novels, including The Book of Aron, which won the Sophie Brody Medal for Jewish Literature, the PEN/New England Award for Fiction, The Ribalow Prize for Fiction, and the Clark Fiction Prize, as well as six story collections, including Like You’d Understand, Anyway, a finalist for the National Book Award and Story Prize winner, and the forthcoming The Queen of Bad Influences. Eight of his stories have been chosen for the Best American Short Stories, two for the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and three for Pushcart Prizes.
He’s been a recipient of the Rea Award for the Short Story, the ALEX Award for Fiction, the Library of Congress/Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. For seven years he was a columnist on film for the magazine The Believer, and his film essays have been collected in The Tunnel at the End of the Light. He’s also written screenplays for two films made from his fiction, AndThenIGo (2017) and TheWorldtoCome (2020). He lives in Williamstown with his wife, Karen Shepard, and a pitty and a beagle, and from 1983 to 2024 taught film and creative writing at Williams College.