Unleashed: Poems by Writers’ Dogs edited by Amy Hempel and Jim Shepard / Birch by Karen Shepard

Unleashed: Poems by Writers’ Dogs

edited by Amy Hempel and Jim Shepard

Top 10 dogs' stories

Birch by Karen Shepard

You gonna eat that?
You gonna eat that?
You gonna eat that?

I’ll eat that.

 

Jim Shepard

How the Academy Saved Novelist Jim Shepard From Mainstream Success

By Boris Kachka

May 12, 2015

Jim Shepard. Photo: Barry Goldstein

Jim Shepard is one of the best writers you’ve never heard of. He’s a tenured professor at Williams College, a job he’s held happily for 32 years — raising his family in pastoral Massachusetts, teaching generations of admiring acolytes, writing dozens of short stories and seven lean novels (including the intense character studies Nosferatu and Project X) to his own strange, exacting specifications.

The Tunnel at the End of the Light by Jim Shepard

The Tunnel at the End of the Light

by Jim Shepard

• The first book of nonfiction from one of our great fiction writers.
  

  Given that most Americans proudly consider themselves non-political, where do our notions of collective responsibility come from? Which self-deceptions, when considering ourselves as actors on the world stage, do we cling to most tenaciously? Why do we so stubbornly believe, for example, that our country always means well when intervening abroad?

Jim Shepard / Courtesy for Beginners

Jim Shepard

Courtesy for Beginners 

by Jim Shepard

I first met Jim Shepard at the Tin House Writers workshop, last July. I had no idea who he was, though his name sounded vaguely familiar. On the day that he gave his craft seminar, I was tempted to skip and explore Portland, but I went because he was doing a close reading of "What We Talk about When We Talk about Love" by Raymond Carver, one of my favorite writers. Jim's lesson was about leaving out and dialogue. The power of not saying or talking around an issue. It was one of the best craft seminars I've attended. 

Type Writing / An Interview with Jim Shepard

Jim Shepard

Type Writing:

An Interview

with Jim Shepard

Lesley M. M. Blume

September 19, 2017

Jim Shepard is always funny in conversation, but never more so than when he’s imparting dark musings about the future of the country or about human nature in general. And he can often be found musing about these dark things, for he is, as he puts it, “resourcefully pessimistic.” As evidence, he cites the title of his just-released book, The Tunnel at the End of the Light: Essays on Movies and Politics. Many of us nursing the bitter cocktail that is the Trump administration are familiar with this sentiment, but Shepard’s book has been decades in the making. There has always been something to despair about, he announces jovially: The title “reflects the sinking sense I’ve had following American politics since the late 1960s. It’s been an ongoing cycle of progressive and thoughtful people saying, Well, this is a new low, but we have something to look forward to—and then hitting a new low after that.” 

Invisible Ink No 169 / Jim Shephard

Jim Shepard

Invisible Ink

No 169 

Jim Shephard

Christopher Fowler
Saturday 20 April 2013 20:00

Here's an unusual situation; an author who's certainly not dead, not unknown or out of print in his native USA, greatly admired, yet ignored and unrepresented on these shores. While UK publishers reprint the most minor Nordic crime novels, we're denied an astonishing American voice.

Jim Shepard / Interview / Christie Hodgen

Jim Shepard

Jim Shepard

by Christie Hodgen

BOMB 115

Spring 2011

An editor friend once told me, in a conspiratorial voice that indicated he was letting me in on a shameful trade secret, that at the end of the day, at those meetings in which he and his colleagues decided which manuscripts to accept and which to decline, it all came down to one question: “Would you pay $23.95 for this?” However crass it might seem, however awkwardly the worlds of art and commerce might be stitched together, the fact remained that a book had to be worth its price. It had to do something for the reader—teach her something she didn’t know, take her somewhere she’d never been. Make her laugh, make her think. And most importantly—and this was where publishing was a business more so than an art—make her want to buy another book. If a manuscript could do that, my friend said, it was a go.

Jim Shepard / Boys Town

BOYS TOWN
By Jim Shepard

NOVEMBER 8, 2010 

Here’s the story of my life: whatever I did wasn’t good enough, anything I figured out I figured out too late, and whenever I tried to help I made things worse. That’s what it’s been like for me as far back as I can remember. Whenever I was about to get somewhere, something would step in and block me. Whenever I was about to finally have something, something would happen to take it away.

Jim Shepard
Photo by Barry Goldstein
Poster by T.A.

My hero: Jim Shepard by Joshua Ferris

The American short-story writer and novelist is the finest living teacher of fiction. His insight is humbling, outrageously perceptive and full of humour


Joshua Ferris
Friday 14 November 2014

I

n life a few fine souls come along to make a strenuous case for how a person should be. They aren’t Figures, Philosophers, Immortals. (Not yet, anyway.) They’re subject to the same sad laws of doom as the rest of us, the same misfortunes, the same fate. But they carry themselves with grace, stand for something noble, serve as ambassadors to a better way.