Fiction Reading by Jim Shepard

Media contact: Noelle Lemoine, communications assistant; tele: (413) 597-4277; email: [email protected]

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., Feb. 16, 2004 – Jim Shepard, author and J. Leland Miller Professor of American History, Literature, and Eloquence at Williams College, will give a reading on Tuesday, Feb. 24, at 8 p.m. in Griffin Hall, room 3. Copies of Shepard’s books will be made available for sale at the event, and a reception will follow.

Jim Shepard, author of such notable books as “Nosferatu” and “Kiss of the Wolf,” has written six novels, including the recently released “Project X,” and two short story collections.

In “Project X,” Shepard engrosses the reader in his “subtle and affecting treatment” of the Columbine-like school-massacre genre. It follows eighth-grade social outcast Edwin Hanratty and his disturbed pal Flake as they descend towards pathological tragedy and madness.

“Shepard is at his most brilliant in capturing the demented essence of junior high—how it manages to be somehow both a Hobbesian jungle and the essential locus of American officialdom…. At school, Edwin is endlessly picked on and bullied; his home, thanks mostly to a hopelessly snide father, is a hothouse of passive aggression. His one source of human amity is Flake, but Flake has started to manifest a far deeper antisociability in which fantasies of violent retribution play a large part. Where Edwin’s father is merely spiteful, Flake’s flashes hints of sadism. It is Flake who finally leads Edwin, a relative innocent, into violence and depravity,” says Stephen Metcalf in his New York Times review.

In a unique and commendable twist to a perhaps over-dramatized subject, Shepard resists the temptation to blame hackneyed societal forces for the teenage decadence he masterfully describes. He implies that the true causes are more complex and psychologically surprising than what is obvious.

“Never before has Jim Shepard’s compassionate virtuosity been on such conspicuous, unsettling, and haunting display,” reads the publisher’s review. “[His novel] suggests that these boys’ central predicament is not their hatred of the world but their agonized and enduring love of it.”

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For building locations on the Williams campus, please consult the map outside the driveway entrance to the Security Office located in Hopkins Hall on Main Street (Rte. 2), next to the Thompson Memorial Chapel, or call the Office of Public Affairs (413) 597-4279. The map can also be found on the web at www.williams.edu/home/campusmap/

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