Batting Against Castro: Stories - Hardcover

Shepard, Jim

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679446680 ISBN 13: 9780679446682

Publisher: Knopf, 1996

Synopsis

With his first collection of stories--some comic, others compassionate, all of them enthralling--Shepard again displays his prodigious writing talent. Ranging from winter-league baseball in pre-revolutionary Cuba to a postapocalyptic frontier in the American South, from the set of Murnau's classic horror film Nosferatu to more familiar scenes of family life, these 14 stories span an immense fictional landscape with great verve and humanity.

About this title

Review:

Jim Shepard's novels include Flights and Kiss of the Wolf. In this, his first short story collection, he skillfully varies his narrative voice and creates ingenious structural forms. In "Mars Attack," the narrator's childhood collection of science-fiction bubble-gum cards serves, as he digs each card out, to stir up painful memories. In "Nosferatu," Shepard invents a putative journal that the German silent film director F.W. Murnau kept during the making of the famous 1922 vampire movie, turning the director himself into a twisted Nosferatu-like figure. The title story is a comic evocation of three farm-league baseball players who travel to Havana in 1951, in search of wine, women, and baseball, only to tangle with a young Fidel Castro.

From Kirkus Reviews:

With four fine novels (Kiss of the Wolf, 1994, etc.) to his credit, Shepard seems to be something of a writer's writer--he's rightly admired by critics and his peers, but a wider readership has yet to develop. This first collection of 14 expert tales could easily be the work to gain Shepard greater visibility--it's smart, economical, and each story displays that most elusive quality: integrity. The volume is divided into two sections, one on ``strangers,'' the other on ``family.'' The first group impresses with its wide array of distinctive, convincing voices. In the title story, a former major-league ballplayer takes a job in pre-revolutionary Cuba, where the championship series prefigures the Cold War. Another jock, the narrator of ``Messiah,'' unsparingly describes his maniacal teammate, a female-abusing, violent superstar. A short piece, ``Reach for the Sky,'' unerringly brings to life an animal- shelter worker who thanklessly deals with the erstwhile owners of abandoned dogs; another captures the self-defining lingo of fighter pilots (``Who We Are, What We're Doing''). Other voices Shepard channels include a clueless adolescent girl on a mission to uplift a poor friend (``Spending the Night with the Poor''), and in a memoiristic tale, German director F.W. Murnau during the making of his epochal film Nosferatu. The stories in the family section explore such things as the nature and particulars of growing up ethnic and Catholic, the struggles to communicate within a family, and the painful loss of loved ones. The effect of an Italian grandmother's death is traced in ``Touch of the Dead''; ``Eustace'' is nothing less than a Catholic version of Philip Roth's great story ``Conversion of the Jews'': A parochial schoolboy infuriates nuns with his persistent, troubling questions. And ``Mars Attacks,'' one of several wrenching pieces about brothers, uses a wrangle over that infamous trading-card series to chronicle the difficult relations of two siblings. A virtuoso collection. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0679446680
• ISBN 13: 9780679446682
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 197