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,...

"Like You'd Understand, Anyway reaches from Chernobyl to Bridgeport, with a host of narrators only Shepard could bring to pitch-perfect life. Among them: a middle-aged Aeschylus taking his place at Marathon, still vying for parental approval. A maddeningly indefatigable Victorian explorer hauling his expedition, whaleboat and all, through the Great Australian Desert in midsummer. The first woman in space and her cosmonaut lover, caught in the star-crossed...

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...

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...

Culling the vastness of experience-from its bizarre fringes and breathtaking pinnacles to the mediocre and desperately below average-like an expert curator, Jim Shepard populates this collection with characters at once wildly diverse and wholly fascinating. A "black world" operative can't tell his wife a word about his daily activities, but doesn't resist sharing her confidences. A young Alpine researcher is smitten by the girlfriend of his dead...

Presents a selection of the best works of short fiction of the past year from a variety of acclaimed sources

Presents a selection of the best works of short fiction of the past year from a variety of acclaimed sources

Abigail is a grieving wife whose life changes with the arrival of a new neighbor, Tallie. As the two women fall in love against the backdrop of the 19th century Northeast, their connection intensifies inciting jealousy from their husbands.

This collection of thirty-eight terrifying tales of serial killers at large, written by the great masters of the genre, plumbs the horrifying depths of a deranged mind and the forces of evil that compel a human being to murder, gruesomely and methodically, over and over again.
From Hannibal Lecter (The Silence of the Lambs) to Patrick Bateman (American Psycho), stories of serial killers and psychos loom large and menacing...