Jim Shepard's Reading List

"Since anthologies are such a common way in which readers encounter great stories, I thought I should suggest at least one anthology. And since so many books that I love are out of print, I also wanted to select one out-of-print book to represent them all."

"Ron Hansen and I did what career counselors suggest: Find a thing you do anyway and find a way to make it pay. In our case, we realised while standing around at writers’ conferences like Bread Loaf that we didn’t often talk about each other’s work, since that could get awkward, and that we didn’t often talk about business, since that could get so depressing. Usually, what we did was pick each other’s brains for stories that we admired and thought other people should read. If you’re standing there with Tim O’Brien you can’t just keep saying to him, “I love your work”. At some point, you need to discuss something different. We often turned to the question, “If I could read just one story, what should I read?” So we came up with the idea of an anthology where we asked a number of writers we admired to pick a story that they love and introduce it. What’s wonderful about the anthology was that some writers chose works that they thought everyone on earth needed to read. So Sue Miller chose Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find”. And others, like Charlie Baxter, just said, “Well, I’m not going to choose somebody that everyone knows about, I’m going to choose someone that nobody knows about.” So he chose Lars Gustafsson’s “Greatness Strikes Where it Pleases”. And we ended up with a nice balance between canonical stories and woefully neglected stories."

"This is one of the two collections that I chose because I thought that they were inescapably influential when it comes to contemporary American writing. Amy has a way of offhandedly rendering dire emotional states. She’s always been breathtakingly tender and funny. The offhandedness combines with the tenderness to produce fiction that’s both dispassionate and compassionate, and I find that a rare and wonderful combination. Amy is considered a minimalist but I think that it would be more accurate to say that she’s a master of emotional indirection. There is a huge tension in her work, and in her protagonists, between guarding information and needing to release it. And one of the strategies her protagonists always choose is to talk about somebody else as a secret way of talking about themselves. She often writes about characters confronting trauma and the possibilities and limitations of recovery. As one character puts it, “Just because you’ve stopped sinking doesn’t mean you’re not still underwater”. Consolation and responsibility are her big subjects. There’s a line in one of her stories that I think could be in any of her stories. One of her characters says to another: “Can we take each other in?” That’s Amy in a nutshell. The fiction writers I admire the most are indicting themselves and their surrogates at least as much as they’re indicting anybody else. I don’t think of fiction as a chance to settle scores and I don’t think that the writers that I’ve cited do either. They do. They probably require more. Poems and short stories are in some way more similar than short stories and novels. Stories, even long short stories, rely a huge amount on what’s unstated and what’s implied. Novels tend to be more comprehensive. Most short stories, even traditional short stories, leave you forced to imagine what will follow. Traditional novels tend to tie everything up. But the anthology you’re referring to, Unleashed : Poems by Writers ’ Dogs , was just a playful undertaking."

"I chose Bear and His Daughter because, although Stone is better known for his novels, this collection contains some of the best things he’s ever done. Nobody writes as well as Stone does about primal psychological states like terror and rapture and dread. It may be that that particular combination of states is what’s best suited for confronting our 21st century. There’s a story in Bear and His Daughter called “Helping”, which is one of the greatest stories of the last 30 years or so. It’s about an alcoholic social worker who is contriving to get his hands on a drink and pitch himself off the wagon. One of the amazing things about the story is the way it undermines what I call the tyranny of the epiphany. The epiphany is usually understood to be that Joycean moment of illumination in stories when the protagonist and the reader, or maybe just the reader, understand something more about the world. Stone’s stories understand the tyranny of that device, and the limitations of the assumption that an enhanced level of self-awareness is inherently liberating. In other words, the idea that once we realise we’re doing something self-destructive or stupid we won’t do it again. We all know from the rubble of our own lives that’s not always the case. Stone is great at writing about characters who are intricately self-aware and yet geniuses at self-destruction. He’s also great on the difficulty of bringing common sense and common decency to bear on things. And he’s easily one of our best writers when it comes to how the personal and the political intertwine in America. He never forgets that personal acts have political ramifications, and that’s a very valuable thing for us to keep in mind right around now. When I’m working on something, I’m so happy if it’s not entirely inert that I don’t dwell on whether it will be a novel, novella or short story. As the shape of the thing takes form, I start to envision how long it will be, and lately that usually means not more than 40 pages. That’s when I realise that – yet again – I’ve come up with something that’s not going to put any food on my children’s table. For me, a short story might take four or five months and a novel might take two or three years. That’s a very big difference in terms of a time commitment. I’ve been doing a lot more stories lately and I don’t know if a factor is being at a teaching-intensive place like Williams, where if you’re working on a novel it’s always being interrupted. Or if it’s because I’m imagining myself into very strange characters and I’m thinking: I can spend five months with this narrator but I don’t think I could take it any longer."

"This is the other inescapably influential collection I was referring to earlier. If you talk to contemporary American writers, this is one of the collections that will keep coming up as something that everybody has read and almost everybody has admired. What I love about Denis’s fiction, particularly Jesus’ Son , is the way it’s populated by people who are marginal by almost any measurable standard. His characters are like truants from life. They keep exposing themselves and we find their psychological nakedness both affecting and appalling. We can’t believe that a human being is this un-self-aware or this self-destructive. I love the way his characters, particularly in Jesus’ Son, are always caught between the person they wish they could be and the person they know they are. He has a spectacular gift for de-familiarising our world through his characters’ heightened perceptions. The poet Stephen Dobyns once said his language is like “a man on tall stilts strapped to roller skates on the slippery dance floor of an ocean liner ploughing through typhoon-ridden seas”. It’s been called both. I think it’s neither fish nor fowl. As a novel, it’s quite episodic and feels suspiciously like a bunch of stories. As a group of stories, it’s the same basic set of characters, so in that sense it feels like a novel. Ultimately, I call it a set of linked stories because at least two of the episodes within the 11 could stand independently as masterpieces of the short story form. Novels, short stories and poems are very much part of the same form. The writer goes into a room accompanied only by their imagination and comes out with something. The reader then does the same thing. Plays seem to me somewhat different in that they’re inevitably collaborative. So you’re writing something that’s meant to activate the imaginations of a number of other people, who then transform what you’ve written by performing it. I don’t think that what’s actually on a page in a David Mamet play is remotely the same as seeing a David Mamet play produced."

"I thought I should choose at least one new writer. I chose her not just for her subject. Others have written about the Rust Belt before. But I hadn’t come across anyone writing about the rural underclass in a while who has her observational eye or, more importantly, who has her ability to respect that world and simultaneously acknowledge its absurdities."

"My stories aren’t all about distant times and places. There’s one story in this new collection, called “Boys Town”, that’s about the contemporary underclass – people who can’t quite tell whether they’ve let themselves down or whether their country’s let them down. Having said that, you’re right that my stories do range all over the place. Part of what coheres them is their emotional centres. The same person is writing them, so the same person is coming back to some of the same obsessions – obsessions that show up in the stories across centuries and across continents. One of my obsessions, for example, is complicity with power that is being ill-used. I’m also interested in the ethical costs of passivity – with what happens when, as Edmund Burke put it, good people do nothing. Reviewers are also starting to catch onto the thematic and emotional links that draw my stories together. They used to just say: These stories are all so different. But now, having seen a few collections, they say: These stories are all so different… and yet there are similarities. Publishers have been hoping for that for a while. It’s hard to understand why short stories don’t catch on, given that they seem to be suited to our frenetic modern lifestyle. I wonder whether that’s partially because readers feel that if they’re going to invest their imagination, they really want it to pay off in terms of time. They think: If I’m going to get invested in a world, I don’t want that world to go away so quickly. They want a trilogy or an 800-page novel. Part of it also might be the mostly unfounded suspicion that short stories are like homework, that they’re closer to poetry than a novel. When you tell readers to read a poem, I think their impulse is often to think: Am I going to understand this? Nobody feels like picking up something for pleasure that will make them feel stupid. So maybe there is a little wariness about short stories, a little worry that they’ll be oblique and unsatisfyingly open-ended. But those are just theories. I don’t think anyone has an answer for why short stories aren’t doing better. For the reason that people read any kind of literature. Short stories at their best show us how we live and why we live the way we live. If you want to learn about the world, and about how other people operate, and about your own inner life, short stories are as good a way as any of getting started. There is nothing about short stories that’s inessential. There is no dithering or throat-clearing in short stories. They dive right into the middle of the matter. Everything in a well-built short story is doing two or three things at once. That kind of density is very, very cool. It means you can get in and get out very, very fast. As I say, they’re like guerrilla warfare in that way."