Join JIM SHEPARD at Harvard Book Store for a discussion of his latest short story collection, The World To Come. Shepard’s other works include Love and Hydrogen; Like You’d Understand, Anyway; and You Think That’s Bad.
The ten stories in World to Come ring with voices belonging to—among others—English Arctic explorers in one of history’s most nightmarish expeditions, a young contemporary American negotiating the shockingly underreported hazards of our crude-oil trains, eighteenth-century French balloonists inventing manned flight, and two mid-nineteenth-century housewives trying to forge a connection despite their isolation on the frontier of settlement. In each case the personal is the political as these characters face everything from the emotional pitfalls of everyday life to historic catastrophes on a global scale. In his fifth collection, Shepard spans borders and centuries powerfully.
Certain books were “banned in Boston” at least as far back as 1651, when one William Pynchon wrote a book criticizing Puritanism.