Jim Shepard at Harvard Book Store
Harvard Book Store, 1256 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA
Admission: Free
Harvard Book Store welcomes Jim Shepard —award-winning author of eight novels and six story collections, including The Book of Aron and Like You’d Understand, Anyway —for a discussion of his new story collection, The Queen of Bad Influences. He will be joined in conversation by Margot Livesey —author of ten novels, including the New York Times bestseller The Flight of Gemma Hardy and her most recent novel The Road from Belhaven. About The Queen of Bad Influences Twelve compressed masterworks from this great American writer of catastrophe fiction, in which lives are upended as much by broken hearts as by collapsing dams, hideously mismanaged wars, gargantuan wildfires, and apocalyptic storms. In Richard Ford’s view, Jim Shepard’s “talent is so various and canny he can write about seemingly anything and make it thrilling to us,” and in these stories spanning six centuries we find viscerally evoked worlds as wildly diverse as a mercenary’s corner of 16th century Madrid, a young apprentice’s pre-Revolutionary Boston, and Edward Hyde’s London. With civil engineers and destitute veterans we encounter the devastating 1935 Labor Day hurricane in Florida, and we read the 1864 letters…