You Think That's Bad

Following Like You’d Understand, Anyway—awarded the Story Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award—Jim Shepard returns with an even more wildly diverse collection of astonishingly observant stories. Like an expert curator, he 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.

A “black world” operative at Los Alamos isn’t allowed to tell his wife anything about his daily activities, but he can’t resist sharing her intimate confidences with his work buddy. A young Alpine researcher falls in love with the girlfriend of his brother, who was killed in an avalanche he believes he caused. An unlucky farm boy becomes the manservant of a French nobleman who’s as proud of his military service with Joan of Arc as he’s aroused by the slaughter of children. A free-spirited autodidact, grieving her lost sister, traces the ancient steps of a ruthless Middle Eastern sect and becomes the first Western woman to travel the Arabian deserts. From the inventor of the Godzilla epics to a miserable G.I. in New Guinea, each comes to realize that knowing better is never enough.

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.

“In just a few short pages, Jim Shepard’s short stories do the work of entire novels… Short story writers almost never get described as ambitious… and yet there’s no better word for Jim Shepard, who thinks big and writes short, without a doubt the most ambitious short story writer in America.”  — The Daily Beast 

If ventriloquism is a lost art, Mr. Shepard has found it.  In these eleven short stories he shows he can move the lips of anyone: a special effects designer on a Japanese film, a fifteenth-century French accomplice to dozens of murders, a retired American soldier reeling with post-traumatic stress disorder.  Then there’s Mr. Shepard’s realistic staging, nailing entire worlds together with teeming, precise detail.  There are few writers today with more artful gifts for active, authentic description.  Shepard doesn’t pick one or two ’telling details’; he propels the reader through whole bravura paragraphs of them… His fine contrivances of cerebration and feeling can remind one of Richard Powers at his best.   And his preference for historical questions, for real people’s big gestures, may help keep American short fiction from falling asleep in the snug little precincts of its usual subject matter.”  — The New York Times Book Review   

“You Think That’s Bad is potent enough to stamp Shepard as one of this generation’s short story masters… Shepard’s language is precise, the scope of his research impressive, and he taps obscure historical events to terrific and terrifying effect.”   —The Oregonian  

“Each of the eleven stories is heartbreaking and true, and not one is less than perfect… One of the most perceptive, intelligent, and fearless writers of fiction in America today.”   —NPR 

“[Shepard’s] genius resides in his omnivorous curiosity and imaginative inventiveness… His stories have the strangeness and bell-like clarity of truth… Shepard has realized a vision of literature that is, in its sideways fashion, legitimately unique.”  — The Washington Post 

“Shepard is the only short story writer I have ever read whose collections come with bibliographies as a matter of course… Humor is Shepard’s constant: it humanizes his larger than life protagonists and helps keep his stories from becoming research papers.  Though he has an obvious camaraderie with George Saunders, Karen Russell, and other leading lights of the absurdist-fabulist school, he is ineluctably a realist writer.”  —Bookforum  

“Another masterpiece… Shepard packs so much history and empathy into each story.”   — Time Out Chicago 

“Time, distance, nationality and profession pose no barrier to Shepard, who combines research with imagination to produce startlingly well-written stories that reaffirm the expansive possibilities of fiction.”  — The Miami Herald 

“Shepard’s cataclysmic renderings are both terrifying and awe-inspiring...  Sublime.”   — O, The Oprah Magazine    

“Impressive… these aren’t ‘write what you know’ stories, and Shepard gets credit for a wide-ranging collection that wrings poignancy out of every subject it touches, from the search for sub-atomic particles to the construction of Mothra.”   — The Onion’s A.V. Club