Knopf recently published Jim Shepard's story collection, Like You'd Understand, Anyway, which has been nominated for the National Book Award. The stories explore masculinity in widely diverse settings and milieus—from the steamy high school football fields of Texas to the Chernobyl disaster to a nineteenth century Australian expedition gone terribly wrong. In fact, a lot of things go wrong in Shepard's fictional worlds, but perhaps that is not surprising. His beautifully chiseled prose feels charged with the same explosive energy that gives rise to abrupt tantrums or the sudden shifting of tectonic plates.

What most impresses me about Shepard's work is the way subtle changes in voice speak so clearly to character complexity and inner conflict—what he calls the braiding together of "self-indictment and self-exoneration." Shepard is the author of six novels (his most recent, Project X, amazes; purchase that book, too) and two previous story collections. He teaches in the MFA program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. As a teacher, Shepard specializes in close, insightful analyses of stories and novels. He's kind and generous and hilariously sarcastic, and I always feel lucky to be in his company. -Jay Ponteri

Loggernaut Reading Series: So much of your fiction deals with male brutality. In your novel Project X, Flake and Edwin are incessantly bullied by classmates, yet in your story, "Trample the Dead, Hurdle the Weak," you imagine the boys (Wainwright and Corey) whose central mission is to "cause panic on the [football] field one hundred percent of the time." One of the things I love about your work is how you have compassion for so many shades of masculinity. And yet what connects both bully and bullied is fear of human weakness. I wonder what continues to remain mysterious for you about boyhood and its counterparts of weakness and rising violence.

Jim Shepard: I think you're right. I think what connects both bully and bullied for me is the fear of human weakness. I'm also fascinated by the ways in which males, to generalize, act out their impulses and their aggressions on each others' bodies—it seems both compelling in and of itself and useful for something like fiction, which needs to dramatize and make concrete human conflict. What continues to remain mysterious to me about boyhood or adolescence and its counterparts of predator and prey is the way boys are so superb at inhabiting both roles, sometimes simultaneously, and doing so while a) being aware they're doing so and b) being only partially formed as individuals, and so also aware that they're inadequate to the task of sorting through all of this. In other words, the way they feel they may have more responsibility than power or control—and the way they find themselves drawn into complicity with the more powerful. Those are all ideas I'm interested in, in general, and adolescent boys seem like a lucid way of throwing such issues into sharper relief.

LRS: I admire how voice in your work captures this mystery between awareness and confusion. In "Courtesy for Beginners" the adolescent narrator is full of self-hatred, and seems to recognize it, yet this partial awareness doesn't bring him any relief. The story places the narrator at a shabbily run summer camp full of boys drowning in what they cannot understand about themselves: loneliness, aberrant impulses, brutality. The voice so subtly displays the narrator's self-hatred. Here the narrator, whose father has just dropped him off, walks down to the counselors' lean-to where other boys hang around, bored and scared:

The fat kid had my glasses. Which was too bad for the fat kid. They were even fixed with electrical tape on the same side mine were. There was a whine in his voice that I could hear from up where I was, and he kept at it. You fucking idiot, I thought the whole time I was walking down to them. I was talking about me. I was always wanting myself to die whenever I found myself in a stupid situation. When I got to the front of the lean-to, I nodded at whoever caught my eye. Nobody nodded back. (165-66)

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