You Think That’s Bad: Stories $15.00
New York, NY: Vintage Books (2012)
A volume of short tales by the National Book Award-finalist author of Like You’d Understand, Anyway features such protagonists as the inventor of the Godzilla epics and an operative who discloses his wife’s secrets when he cannot share his own.
Project X $50.00
New York, NY: Knopf (2004)
Near fine in dust jacket.
Hanratty and his only friend, Flake, struggle to deal with the nightmare of junior high school–bullying, girls who taunt them, jocks who beat them up, a creepy old man who stalks them, and a disaffected sixth grader who adores them–until their demoralization is transformed into a growing yearning for a deadly revenge.
Like You’d Understand, Anyway $75.00
New York, NY: Knopf (2007)
Fine in dust jacket.
Like You’d Understand, Anyway reaches from Chernobyl to Bridgeport, with a host of narrators. Among them: a middle-aged Aeschylus 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 orbits of their joint mission. Two Texas high school football players at the top of their food chain, soliciting their fathers’ attention by leveling everything before them on the field. And the rational and compassionate chief executioner of Paris, whose occupation, during the height of the Terror, eats away at all he holds dear.
Nosferatu $50.00
New York, NY: Knopf (1998)
Fine in dust jacket.
From the airfields of World War I to Berlin’s postwar cafes, a fictional portrait of F. W. Murnau, the German director behind the landmark film, Nosferatu, portrays him as a solitary genius haunted by the loss of a lover.
Kiss of the Wolf $50.00
New York, NY: Harcourt Brace & Co. (1994)
Near fine in dust jacket.
Love and Hydrogen: New and Selected Stories $50.00
New York, NY: Vintage (2004)
Fine in publisher’s wrappers.
Wednesday June 24, 2015
Signing: 5:00
Reading: 5:30
The Book of Aron $23.95
New York, NY: Knopf (2015) As new in dust jacket.
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, disease, and persecution. He and a handful of boys and girls risk their lives by scuttling around the ghetto to smuggle and trade contraband through the quarantine walls in hopes of keeping their fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters alive, hunted all the while by blackmailers and by Jewish, Polish, and German police, not to mention the Gestapo.
When his family is finally stripped away from him, Aron is rescued by Janusz Korczak, a doctor renowned throughout prewar Europe as an advocate of children’s rights who, once the Nazis swept in, was put in charge of the Warsaw orphanage. Treblinka awaits them all, but does Aron manage to escape—as his mentor suspected he could—to spread word about the atrocities?
Jim Shepard has masterfully made this child’s-eye view of the darkest history mesmerizing, sometimes comic despite all odds, truly heartbreaking, and even inspiring. Anyone who hears Aron’s voice will remember it forever.
You Think That’s Bad: Stories $50.00
New York, NY: Knopf (2011)
Fine in dust jacket.
Culling the vastness of experience like an expert curator, Shepard populates this collection with characters at once wildly diverse and wholly fascinating. These stories traverse centuries, continents, and social strata, yet what they depict with devastating sensitivity is utterly universal.