Radio Galaxy

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It’s here. At last. My interview with Jim Shepard, author of Like You’d Understand, Anyway, the inaugural selection of the Radio Galaxy Book Club. Many thanks to Laura Conaway for technical support.

Shepard was an incredibly gracious interview subject. We talked for nearly an hour about the stories in the book—whose protagonists include an executioner during the French Revolution, a soldier in Hadrian’s army, and an engineer at the Chernobyl disaster. Shepard fielded questions from some of our loyal book club members, including Kymm in Barcelona and Seth in Kansas. I asked him about the prevalence of male suffering and ineptitude in his stories (he thinks women have a reason to care about this, too, despite Rebecca in Berlin’s opinions to the contrary). And he spoke compellingly about the writer’s duty to go out in the world and report on what he or she finds. “Part of the project of literature,” says Shepard, “is empathy.”

The piece is between 12 and 13 minutes long. Enjoy.

I’m working on a new selection, and will keep you posted.

By now, I think all you Radio Galaxy Book Club people who intend to read Jim Shepard’s Like You’d Understand, Anyway along with us have probably gotten the book. I know some of you have read it. So it’s time to start getting questions together, because I have set a date to interview Shepard.

It’s going to happen October 1. And I want your help in figuring out what I’m going to talk with him about.

Then I’ll get you the results, in some form—audio, text, or a combination of the two.

Sound good? Get reading, and drop me your questions in the comments or by e-mail here.

In the meantime, check out the video above, in which Shepard reads from the book, starting with the beginning of the story “Pleasure Boating in Lituya Bay.” It’s a brilliant example of his ability to enter a real historic moment and use it as a jumping-off place for creating characters.

If you want to learn more about the extraordinary events of July 9, 1958, in Lituya Bay, you could start here.

For all you faithful members of the BPP Book Club who said you would follow where I went, and for those who are joining us for the first time, the moment has come for the announcement of the first Radio Galaxy Book Club selection.

And it is…Like You’d Understand, Anyway, by Jim Shepard. I can’t tell you all how excited I am to be able to share it with you.

In this superb collection of short stories, Shepard inhabits the lives of an executioner during the French Revolution, a Roman soldier on patrol, a Soviet cosmonaut about to go into space, and an American boy at summer camp, among others. Each story is utterly engrossing and utterly different. Read this book and you’ll see why it was a finalist for the National Book Award and why it won the prestigious Story Prize.

Not only is he incredibly talented and prolific (he’s written six novels and two other collections of stories), Shepard is also a really nice guy. So he has agreed to do an interview with us, in the style of the old BPP Book Club, in which he’ll respond to some of the questions that come up in our discussion.

Then we’ll get you that interview, most likely in podcast form. Stick with us, we’re working on the details.

The paperback comes out August 12. We’ll give you at least a month to read it. I’ll be blogging about the book periodically here.

If you’d like to receive Radio Galaxy Book Club alerts, send me an e-mail here.