JIM SHEPARD is the author of seven previous novels, most recently The Book of Aron (winner of the 2016 PEN New England Award, the Sophie Brody medal for achievement in Jewish literature, the Ribalow Prize for Jewish literature, the Clark Fiction Prize, and a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award) and five story collections, including Like You'd Understand, Anyway, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and won The Story Prize. His short fiction has appeared in, among other magazines, The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, McSweeney's, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, Esquire, Tin House, Granta, Zoetrope, Electric Literature, and Vice, and has often been selected for The Best American Short Stories and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. He lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with his wife, three children, and three beagles, and he teaches at Williams College.
ONE OF THE A.V. CLUB'S BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
"For the foreseeable future, we remain in the era of hot takes
about Covid-19 and our governments' responses to it. And yet,
somehow, working to a deeper rhythm, Shepard has managed to make
art out of our crisis with a thought-provoking work of fiction that
sustains our emotions . . . Vivid and carefully researched, it's
clearly the product of long and conscientious work. It lands
uncannily now, since at some point during its gestation, real life
caught up with the book's speculative world . . . Phase Six
works across a big canvas: from vividly drawn Greenland to teeming
I.C.U.s in the United States, to the high-tech detective work
involved in tracking down the pathogen. Shepard writes persuasively
about the disparate places and lives connected by the disaster
[and] shows his gift for making art from the lives of people living
in extremis. He does this with a patient, naturalistic eye
for detail and a style in which exactitude and plainness bring
bracing poetry . . . What makes the book engaging and ultimately
uplifting is the emotionally complex lives of its central
characters." -Marcel Theroux, The New York Times Book
Review
"Stunning . . . A fast-paced, suspenseful story about what happens
when a different microbe is unleashed on the world . . . [Shepard]
manages to keep his human protagonists and their complicated,
contradictory emotions front and center . . . While the novel is
thrilling, it's less of a thriller than a love story-an ode to
family, friends, lovers, hard work and the beautiful, heartbreaking
innocence of childhood." -Ann Levin, AP
"[Shepard] nails the scientific details, but also the cultural ones
. . . [I] devoured the first 100 pages before I knew what was
happening. If I'd been in a bookstore, I'd have sat on the floor."
-Dwight Garner, The New York Times
"Paced like a prophetic thriller . . . Shepard has frequently
employed research as a foundation for his literary creations, but
never before in such pulse-racing fashion . . . Readers will find
themselves in territory that feels eerily familiar-panic, politics,
uncertainty, fear, a resistance to quarantine, an overload of media
noise-as Shepard's command of tone never lets the tension ease . .
. All the narrative propulsion of escapist fiction without the
escape." -Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Riveting . . . Shepard writes with drilling authority
about Greenland, epidemiology, the challenges women doctors and
scientists face, and the confounding complexities of the microbial
world. With word-by-word artistry, fluid compassion, and deep
insights, Shepard emphatically dramatizes epic failures,
self-sacrificing dedication, desolation, and love." -Donna Seaman,
Booklist (starred review)
"If you've been waiting for the great novel of the COVID-19
era, it's in your hands. I read Phase Six with a galloping heart.
With heroic humor and a poet's ear and eye for what makes humanity
worth saving, Shepard's polyphonic novel of contagion and collapse
is also the story of love's unlikely survival in the most hostile
conditions." -Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia!
"Jim Shepard not only writes at the cutting edge of literature, but
he IS the cutting edge of literature. He excavates the twin crises
of our era-climate change and pathogens-and builds a story that is
as poignant as it is true. The writing is stunning. The research is
stunning. The after-effect is stunning. Phase Six is a great book
for our times: the past, the present and those that-we hope-are yet
to come." -Colum McCann, author of Apeirogon
"No amount of prior admiration for Jim Shepard's fiction prepared
me for the magnificent Phase Six-a book at once so wise and so
funny, so bleak and so tender. With astonishing virtuosity, he
conveys huge amounts of information in a way that is not only lucid
but utterly gripping, and he creates characters who make me want to
rush into the novel to save them from the virus and themselves.
What a triumph!" -Margot Livesey, author of The Boy in the
Field
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