Free Ebook Love and Hydrogen: New and Selected Stories, by Jim Shepard
There is no doubt that book Love And Hydrogen: New And Selected Stories, By Jim Shepard will certainly consistently make you motivations. Also this is simply a book Love And Hydrogen: New And Selected Stories, By Jim Shepard; you can find lots of genres as well as types of books. From delighting to experience to politic, and scientific researches are all provided. As just what we specify, below we provide those all, from renowned authors as well as author around the world. This Love And Hydrogen: New And Selected Stories, By Jim Shepard is one of the compilations. Are you interested? Take it now. How is the means? Read more this short article!
Love and Hydrogen: New and Selected Stories, by Jim Shepard
Free Ebook Love and Hydrogen: New and Selected Stories, by Jim Shepard
This is it guide Love And Hydrogen: New And Selected Stories, By Jim Shepard to be best seller lately. We offer you the most effective deal by getting the spectacular book Love And Hydrogen: New And Selected Stories, By Jim Shepard in this website. This Love And Hydrogen: New And Selected Stories, By Jim Shepard will not just be the type of book that is tough to find. In this internet site, all kinds of books are offered. You could look title by title, author by author, and publisher by author to figure out the best book Love And Hydrogen: New And Selected Stories, By Jim Shepard that you could check out currently.
It can be one of your early morning readings Love And Hydrogen: New And Selected Stories, By Jim Shepard This is a soft documents book that can be got by downloading from on-line book. As known, in this innovative period, innovation will certainly ease you in doing some activities. Even it is merely checking out the presence of publication soft file of Love And Hydrogen: New And Selected Stories, By Jim Shepard can be added attribute to open. It is not only to open up as well as conserve in the gizmo. This time around in the early morning and also other downtime are to read guide Love And Hydrogen: New And Selected Stories, By Jim Shepard
Guide Love And Hydrogen: New And Selected Stories, By Jim Shepard will certainly still offer you good value if you do it well. Finishing guide Love And Hydrogen: New And Selected Stories, By Jim Shepard to review will certainly not end up being the only objective. The objective is by obtaining the good value from the book up until the end of the book. This is why; you need to find out even more while reading this Love And Hydrogen: New And Selected Stories, By Jim Shepard This is not just exactly how quick you read a publication and also not only has how many you finished the books; it is about exactly what you have actually obtained from the books.
Considering guide Love And Hydrogen: New And Selected Stories, By Jim Shepard to check out is also needed. You can choose the book based upon the favourite motifs that you like. It will involve you to enjoy checking out various other books Love And Hydrogen: New And Selected Stories, By Jim Shepard It can be additionally regarding the necessity that binds you to read guide. As this Love And Hydrogen: New And Selected Stories, By Jim Shepard, you can find it as your reading book, also your favourite reading book. So, discover your preferred book here and get the link to download and install the book soft documents.
I’ve been a problem baby, a lousy son, a distant brother, an off-putting neighbor, a piss-poor student, a worrisome seatmate, an unreliable employee, a bewildering lover, a frustrating confidante and a crappy husband. Among the things I do pretty well at this point I’d have to list darts, re-closing Stay-Fresh boxes, and staying out of the way.
This is the self-eulogy offered early on by the unwilling hero of the opening story in this collection, a dazzling array of work in short fiction from a master of the form. The stories in Love and Hydrogen—familiar to readers from publications ranging from McSweeney’s to The New Yorker to Harper’s to Tin House—encompass in theme and compassion what an ordinary writer would seem to need several lifetimes to imagine.
A frustrated wife makes use of an enterprising illegal-gun salesman to hold her husband hostage; two hapless adult-education students botch their attempts at rudimentary piano but succeed in a halting, awkward romance; a fascinated and murderous Creature welcomes the first human visitors to his Black Lagoon; and in the title story, the stupefyingly huge airship Hindenburg flies to its doom, representing in 1937 mankind's greatest yearning as well as its titanic failure.
Generous in scope and astonishing in ambition, Shepard’s voice never falters; the virtuosity of Love and Hydrogen cements his reputation as, in the words of Rick Bass, “a passionate writer with a razor-sharp wit and an elephantine heart”—in short, one of the most powerful talents at work today.
- Sales Rank: #876874 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Vintage
- Model: 961133
- Published on: 2004-01-27
- Released on: 2004-01-27
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .73" w x 5.20" l, .56 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 340 pages
Features
- Used Book in Good Condition
From Booklist
Although Shepard's mordantly funny, unsettling, yet immensely gratifying short stories race off in unforeseeable directions, they always veer into the crimson glare of trauma or death. As the ludicrous collides with the profound, the two axes of the human condition, the reader experiences a weird elation because Shepard, shrewdly deadpan and witty, gets it exactly right as he riffs on historical events and raids the junkyard of pop culture. In the extraordinarily imaginative title story, for instance, he vividly re-creates the flight of the doomed Hindenburg airship, on which two male crew members conduct a taboo affair. Elsewhere, Shepard enters the minds of The Who's John Entwhistle, the creature of the Black Lagoon, and John Ashcroft. Daringly inventive, as skillful as a top surgeon, and as clever, quirky, and right-on as David Byrne and Warren Zevon, to jump art forms, Shepard is breathtaking. Donna Seaman
Copyright � American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"This is one of the most important collections in years, because Shepard does so many things that are all too rare in the medium. He gives us red-blooded characters who leave the living room and fly, kayak, dive, search, and emerge from swamps to devour unwitting campers. Stories about dissolving marriages are fine, but how about two gay engineers on the Hindenberg? Or a 19th century man searching for a giant half-shark/half-whale? These are uniformly bold and exhilarating stories. Let's hope Shepard becomes as influential as he should be. He's the best we've got."
--Dave Eggers
"In a first-rate gathering of 22 stories, bizarre premises drawn from history and popular culture share space with moving examinations of deranged family dynamics . . . Adventurous and enthralling work from one of the most interesting of all contemporary American writers."
--Kirkus, starred review
"These are some of my favorite short stories of the past decade. Reading them is like encountering our national literature in microcosm: multiform and polyrhythmic, violent and fanciful, erudite and hard-boiled, built on twin foundations of nostalgia for the never-was, and of that millennial American optimism that is indistinguishable from despair."
--Michael Chabon
“Jim Shepard’s access to different voices, social types, levels of experience, is truly astonishing. He has observed deeply, and his selection of detail from that observation is brilliant. This is the work of a deft, audacious artist.” --Norman Rush
“Shepard’s writing is lean, assured, never canned; it is sometimes cinematic and often astringently funny. He reconstructs the ordinary and offers the surreal as a given, [finding] highly original ways into the most moving stories.” --Amy Hempel
From the Inside Flap
"I've been a problem baby, a lousy son, a distant brother, an off-putting neighbor, a piss-poor student, a worrisome seatmate, an unreliable employee, a bewildering lover, a frustrating confidante and a crappy husband. Among the things I do pretty well at this point I'd have to list darts, re-closing Stay-Fresh boxes, and staying out of the way. This is the self-eulogy offered early on by the unwilling hero of the opening story in this collection, a dazzling array of work in short fiction from a master of the form. The stories in Love and Hydrogen--familiar to readers from publications ranging from "McSweeney's to "The "New Yorker to "Harper's to "Tin House--encompass in theme and compassion what an ordinary writer would seem to need several lifetimes to imagine.A frustrated wife makes use of an enterprising illegal-gun salesman to hold her husband hostage; two hapless adult-education students botch their attempts at rudimentary piano but succeed in a halting, awkward romance; a fascinated and murderous Creature welcomes the first human visitors to his Black Lagoon; and in the title story, the stupefyingly huge airship Hindenburg flies to its doom, representing in 1937 mankind's greatest yearning as well as its titanic failure. Generous in scope and astonishing in ambition, Shepard's voice never falters; the virtuosity of Love and Hydrogen cements his reputation as, in the words of Rick Bass, "a passionate writer with a razor-sharp wit and an elephantine heart"--in short, one of the most powerful talents at work today.
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Shepard: Hedgehog
By Patrick Mc Coy
I think Isaiah Berlin's classification of writers as hedgehogs (those who have one great theme) and foxes (those who have many themes) can be a useful classification of writers. Jim Shepard is definitely a fox. In this collection, Love and Hydrogen, much like last year's Pulitzer Prize nominated collection Like You'd Understand is a dizzying array of original and inventive stories. There are quirky tales of dysfunctional families: "gun lobby," "Runway," and "The Morality of Parents." He has a number of sports related stories, some of which infuse historical events into them like "Batting Against Castro" (about baseball and politics in pre-revolution Cuba) as well as "Ajax Is All About Attack" (which is about 60s politics in The Netherlands and soccer). One of Shepperd's greatest strengths is the adolescent coming of age story: "Mars Attacks," "Glut Your Soul On My Accursed Ugliness," "and "Spending The Night With The Poor." It is also apparent that Shepperd often infuses his stories with scientific or historical research: gay Nazis in love in a zeppelin ("Love and Hydrogen"), WWII battles behind occupied lines ("The Assassination of Reinhard Heydad"), deep sea exploration ("descent into Perpetual Night") and exploration of uncharted lands ("Astounding Stories") to name a few of his forays into history and science. I'd like to read one of his novels and see how he manages to sustain a story into a longer narrative.
13 of 14 people found the following review helpful.
We have become the inexplicable
By tom nguyen
Reading Jim Shepard's `Love and Hydrogen' right after Adam Haslett's overwrought and over-rated `You Are Not a Stranger Here' was what I needed to re-affirm my faith in short fiction as an art form. As a reader I want a fulfillment of what fiction promises: a mimesis; that the author will try to inhabit other lives and situations and render them in a way that produces something novel for me. I don't need self-affirmation or a lesson. I want a story. And in a short story collection I want stories. Many times, such as in Haslett's book, the situations are so repetitive that you suspect that the author is rendering his own life through these stories, that self-indulgence and egotism over-ride art or any interest in art. Sorry for writing of my opinion of Haslett's work, but it brought into stark contrast why I liked this collection so much more.
Shepard's work is most notable for its incredible diversity of setting, voice and theme: a teen-age girl's first person account of a friendship strained by class division (Spending the Night With the Poor), the disaffections and fascination of a Yugoslav footballer in progressive 1960's Holland (Ajax is All About Attack), the thrill and resignation of a World War II German test pilot (Climb Aboard the Mighty Flea) are just a sample. He can approach a story as a straight ahead narrative (The Mortality of Parents) or as an ironic romp(The Creature from the Black Lagoon) and yet he always seems to find his way to the dark heart of the story. He is at his best when he takes on narratives or personae that we think we know and produces something startlingly fresh: `We Won't Get Fooled Again' a brief history of The Who from the eyes of their most enigmatic member, bassist John Entwhistle, is hilarious and heart-rending.
Nor is Shepard ideologically bound; in his exceptional story `John Ashcroft: More Important Things Than Me' he paints a self-portrait of the man that is at once more generous and chilling than any number of partisan biographies could hope to accomplish. Characters who would be no more than walk-ons or caricatures in another writer's story take centre-stage with Shepard, and you get the feeling that no character is automatically invested with more insight or dignity than any other. In all, it is a refreshing approach and one that declares a fuller, more humanistic artistic vision than ninety percent of the reheated autobiographies that masquerade as fiction today. The only weak point I found in the collection was `Alicia and Emmet with the 17th Lancers at Balaclava' where the interweaving narratives felt somewhat strained. It is a minor drawback, like a complaint about the scuff-marks on Fred Astaire's floor.
At first this incredible array of voices and settings may seem like a self-conscious tour de force, that the author is trying to keep you on your heels with off-speed pitches because he doesn't have any real `stuff', but the writing is so good and the voice so authentic that the novelty of reading a story about something other than domestic conflicts seems secondary. I was thinking for a word to describe this work, which reads like an anthology of great writing, and I could only come up with fearlessness, that Shepard has no fear, and that alloyed with his skill and curiosity and utter decency as an artist, he has given us a work of depth and intelligence and beauty. Here's the last paragraph of the final story in the collection �'Climb Aoard the Mighty Flea' where a World War II German pilot, knowing a horrific war has already been lost, straps himself into the first rocket powered fighter plane,
'No one's speaking. Our ears are on the slipstream. Our thumbs are on the cannon triggers. Our hearts are in the dive. We have become the inexplicable. We have beome the unbelievable. We are our own descendants, the children we have always wanted to be.'
Wow.
16 of 17 people found the following review helpful.
John Ashcroft & the creature from the black lagoon
By Jeff Topham
This is the best short fiction collection I've read in several years. Shepard's stories are both economical and lean--there isn't much here that's over 20 pages long, but Shepard packs into those 20 pages a complexity of theme and character that most writers can't approach even at novella length. It is a dizzying collection, by turns violent, funny, and wrenchingly sad. Shepard writes in a dazzling array of voices, handling each with effortless authority. He is particularly good at adolescents (see also the amazing Project X), but these stories also give voice to a Yugoslav football player, a German test pilot, John Entwhistle, John Ashcroft, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Superb.
See all 13 customer reviews...
Love and Hydrogen: New and Selected Stories, by Jim Shepard PDF
Love and Hydrogen: New and Selected Stories, by Jim Shepard EPub
Love and Hydrogen: New and Selected Stories, by Jim Shepard Doc
Love and Hydrogen: New and Selected Stories, by Jim Shepard iBooks
Love and Hydrogen: New and Selected Stories, by Jim Shepard rtf
Love and Hydrogen: New and Selected Stories, by Jim Shepard Mobipocket
Love and Hydrogen: New and Selected Stories, by Jim Shepard Kindle
Love and Hydrogen: New and Selected Stories, by Jim Shepard PDF
Love and Hydrogen: New and Selected Stories, by Jim Shepard PDF
Love and Hydrogen: New and Selected Stories, by Jim Shepard PDF
Love and Hydrogen: New and Selected Stories, by Jim Shepard PDF
