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This is the self-eulogy offered early on by the unwilling hero of the opening story in this collection, a dazzling array of work in short fiction from a master of the form. The stories in Love and Hydrogen—familiar to readers from publications ranging from McSweeney’s to The New Yorker to Harper’s to Tin House—encompass in theme and compassion what an ordinary writer would seem to need several lifetimes to imagine.
A frustrated wife makes use of an enterprising illegal-gun salesman to hold her husband hostage; two hapless adult-education students botch their attempts at rudimentary piano but succeed in a halting, awkward romance; a fascinated and murderous Creature welcomes the first human visitors to his Black Lagoon; and in the title story, the stupefyingly huge airship Hindenburg flies to its doom, representing in 1937 mankind's greatest yearning as well as its titanic failure.
Generous in scope and astonishing in ambition, Shepard’s voice never falters; the virtuosity of Love and Hydrogen cements his reputation as, in the words of Rick Bass, “a passionate writer with a razor-sharp wit and an elephantine heart”—in short, one of the most powerful talents at work today.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
December 18, 2007 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780307426710
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780307426710
- File size: 368 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Starred review from January 1, 2004
Although Shepard's mordantly funny, unsettling, yet immensely gratifying short stories race off in unforeseeable directions, they always veer into the crimson glare of trauma or death. As the ludicrous collides with the profound, the two axes of the human condition, the reader experiences a weird elation because Shepard, shrewdly deadpan and witty, gets it exactly right as he riffs on historical events and raids the junkyard of pop culture. In the extraordinarily imaginative title story, for instance, he vividly re-creates the flight of the doomed "Hindenburg "airship, on which two male crew members conduct a taboo affair. Elsewhere, Shepard enters the minds of The Who's John Entwhistle, the creature of the Black Lagoon, and John Ashcroft. Daringly inventive, as skillful as a top surgeon, and as clever, quirky, and right-on as David Byrne and Warren Zevon, to jump art forms, Shepard is breathtaking. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2004, American Library Association.)
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