Jubilee King : Stories

A collection of stories striking in both their originality and their quiet confidence.

Two men, one young, one old, dig for the bones of a long-dead mare late at night in hopes of salvaging the elder's last hope for prosperity. A caretaker balances precariously on his roof in the rain to free a bird trapped inside his chimney. A pair of brothers drive along the Pacific coast in search of danger, adventure, and escape. A man and a woman drift apart from each other in a slow and inevitable motion. Jesse Shepard's stories are moments of subdued desperation, told simply and candidly and tempered with dry humor.

In the tradition of Sherwood Anderson and Flannery O'Connor, Jubilee King offers spare and deft navigations of the distance between people, between words, between moments. Jesse Shepard finds evidence of the grotesque in the everyday, the meaningful in the mundane, giving shape to the negative spaces that separate us from each other and from ourselves. Against the rugged Western landscapes that most of his characters call home, Shepard circumnavigates a series of small but momentous occurrences that converge to form a spirited and assured debut.