You Think That's Bad: Stories by Jim Shepard; Unabridged MP3 Audio Book; Narrator Bronson Pinchot

Culling the vastness of experience--from its bizarre fringes and breathtaking pinnacles to the mediocre and desperately below average--like an expert curator, Jim Shepard populates this collection with characters at once wildly diverse and wholly fascinating. A "black world" operative can't tell his wife a word about his daily activities, but doesn't resist sharing her confidences. A young Alpine researcher is smitten by the girlfriend of his dead brother, killed in an avalanche he believes he caused. An unlucky farm boy becomes the manservant of a French nobleman who's as proud of having served with Joan of Arc as he's aroused by slaughtering children. A free spirit tracks an ancient Shia sect, becoming the first Western woman to travel the Arabian Deserts. From the inventor of the Godzilla epics to a miserable G.I. in New Guinea, each is complicit in his or her downfall and comes to learn that, in love, knowing better is never enough.

Jim Shepard is the author of six novels and three previous collections. Like You'd Understand, Anyway won the Story Prize and was a National Book Award finalist. One of his stories appeared in Best American Short Stories 2010. He lives with his wife and their three children in Williamstown, Massachusetts.