Award winning author Jim Shepard returns with an even more wildly diverse collection of astonishingly observant stories. On May 26th, 2011 Shepard read from this new collection of short stories, You Think That's Bad, released in March 2011. Reading only the beginnings of three stories within the collection, Shepard finishes with "Boys Town" which was originally published in The New Yorker in November, 2010. Afterwords the writer answers questions from the audience, dipping briefly into his life and how he creates as he does. Enthralling and unfailingly compassionate, You Think That’s Bad traverses centuries, continents, and social strata, but the joy and struggle that Shepard depicts with such devastating sensitivity—all the heartbreak, alienation, intimacy, and accomplishment—has a universal resonance.
Shepard is the author of six novels and three story collections, one of which, Like You'd Understand, Anyway, was awarded the Story Prize and competed as a finalist for the National Book Award. Like an expert curator, Shepard populates the vastness of human experience—from its bizarre fringes and lonely, breathtaking pinnacles to the hopelessly mediocre and desperately below average—with brilliant scientists, reluctant soldiers, workaholic artists, female explorers, depraved murderers, and deluded losers, all wholly convincing and utterly fascinating.
