Batting Against Castro

With his first collection of stories--some comic, others compassionate, all of them enthralling--Shepard again displays his prodigious writing talent. Ranging from winter-league baseball in pre-revolutionary Cuba to a postapocalyptic frontier in the American South, from the set of Murnau's classic horror film Nosferatu to more familiar scenes of family life, these 14 stories span an immense fictional landscape with great verve and humanity.

“The 14 stories in Jim Shepard's first collection, Batting Against Castro, are almost bewilderingly various in style and subject, but each is delivered with consummate skill. And several are so imaginative and mysterious and have such distinctive voices that they seem certain to take up permanent residence in a reader's memory.  ‘Nosferatu,’ which purports to be a journal kept by the German film director F. W. Murnau during the creation of his famous 1922 vampire movie, feels like a masterpiece to me. Chronically ill and scorned for his homosexual ‘propensities,’ Murnau, as imagined by Mr. Shepard, is a man ‘at home in no house and in no country’ -- a Nosferatu himself, full of self-loathing and afraid of his own ‘terrible inhumanness.’ The narrative takes us from the film's preproduction through its first rough projection -- easily the scope of a novel -- yet the telling requires less than 30 pages. It is this sort of demonstration of Mr. Shepard's uncommon talent that raises Batting Against Castro into fiction's major leagues.   —The New York Times Book Review  

A memorable cast of characters faces various forms of alienation – psychological, political, physical, economic, social – in 14 alternately humorous and poignant short stories from novelist Shepard, [who] crafts an astonishing assortment of utterly convincing voices… Each of these seamless, insightful narratives stands vividly on its own.”  —Publisher’s Weekly  

“Jim Shepard’s first collection of short stories reads like a prize anthology, such is the range and success of Batting Against Castro.  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, and finds highly original ways into the most moving stories.”  — Amy Hempel 

“There is more than one kind of virtuosity on display in this collection of unnerving, finely achieved stories. 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 

“Jim Shepard is a passionate and talented writer with a razor-sharp with and an elephantine heart; his work is a combination of both mean and sweet.  These stories, extraordinary in breadth and width, are a joy and a privilege and a pleasure to read.   I want more.”  — Rick Bass