Book cover of Like You'd Understand Anyway

Book description

Following his widely acclaimed Project X and Love and Hydrogen—“Here is the effect of these two books,” wrote the Chicago Tribune: “A reader finishes them buzzing with awe”—Jim Shepard now gives us his first entirely new collection in more than a decade.

Like You’d Understand, Anyway reaches from Chernobyl to…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Like You'd Understand Anyway as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Similar to The Trojan War Museum, these stories are tonally more in synch (after all, with a title like that, it’s hard to overstate the role attitude plays in these), but also like Trojan War Museum, it’s a wonderful collection that shows how absolutely not-repetitive an attitude can feel when its voices are given such specific and niche jargons for each story, such interesting and far-flung locales and, such wacky and hopeless situations for its characters to overcome.

Jim Shepard is a must read for anyone interested in writing against the adage: “write what you know”. Also, the story “Zero…

From Kenan's list on polyphonic story collections.

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These Blue Mountains by Sarah Loudin Thomas,

A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.

German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…

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