Batting Against Castro: Stories

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.

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.