Love and Hydrogen: New and Selected Stories

“These are some of my favorite short stories of the past decade.  Reading them is like encountering our national literature in microcosm: multiform and polyrhythmic, violent and fanciful, erudite and hard-boiled, built on twin foundations of nostalgia for the never-was, and of that millennial American optimism that is indistinguishable from despair.”   — Michael Chabon 

“Jim Shepard is a fiction writer of peculiar but tantalizing gifts.  He loves to inhabit the outlandish subject …and yet he is anything but a farceur or a virtuoso showoff.  Shepard’s style is instead lapidary and a little cold, his fiction a fiction of clues rather than punch lines or epiphanies…  He lays down innocuous sentence after innocuous sentence until you find, to your surprise, your heart lurching.”   — The New York Times Book Review 

“Each of the stories in this collection is rich in humor, irony, and inexplicably appealing characters…Shepard, who is often referred to as a ‘writer’s writer’ (a condition that can be the kiss of death for wage earning, though it’s great for literature) is, without any pomp or pyrotechnics, a writer utterly unique.”  — The Los Angeles Times 

“Shepard is something of a patron saint of the maladapted… Even his characters are amazed to find themselves where they end up, sometimes facing death, sometimes revelation, but always in motion.  Stasis is their enemy.  William Beebe, inventor of the bathysphere, who appears in the story “Descent into Perpetual Night,” says of a voice cabled down to him in the deep that its ‘breath and warmth’ were ’the most durable of illusions.’  We could say the same of Shepard’s, and his stories.”   — Bookforum  

“A pointillist master of middle-American disaffection, second-shoe-dropping comic rhythm, pop-cult radiation, and the deceivingly unsimple art of inarticulation, Jim Shepard might be considered a national treasure if he’d show off more… As it is, he is a writer best appreciated for the incomprehensible madness that manifests between his laconic lines of narrative, as well as for his refusal to peacock his prose at the expense of his none-too-sharp, painfully honest characters… Shepard has been honing his weapons for over twenty years now, and the new story collection, Love and Hydrogen, comes off like a wonder cabinet of sympathetically imagined cataclysm.”  — The Village Voice   

“These works have the wry restraint of Donald Barthelme…If Shepard, for whatever reason, is not on your radar, he probably should be.  The voice he brings to these stories is subtle and genuine but also quite mutable.  You will believe him when he puts a strange spin on a beloved old horror movie, you will believe him when he describes the inner life of a crewman on the Hindenburg, and you will believe him when he gives us a peek into the mind of an aimlessly angry adolescent.”   — The San Francisco Chronicle 

“[Shepard] has this unearthly ability to disappear inside his characters — from John Ashcroft to the Creature from the Black Lagoon, which, admittedly, may not be that wide a range.  Yet conservatives could read “John Ashcroft: More Important Things Than Me” and not detect a hint of condescension.  Liberals could read it, gain respect for the attorney general — and still find him unnerving.”   —The Dallas News  

“As the ludicrous collides with the profound, the two axes of the human condition, the reader experiences a weird elation because Shepard, shrewdly deadpan and witty, gets it exactly right as he riffs on historical events and raids the junkyard of pop culture.”  — Booklist 

“Jim Shepard’s audacious and extraordinarily imaginative short stories are as necessary as Love and Hydrogen.”   — Vanity Fair