(Shepard, Jim) Jim Shepard is the author of seven novels, including most recently The Book of Aron, five story collections, including Like You’d Understand, Anyway―a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of The Story Prize―and editor of the anthology. He teaches at Williams College. The Tunnel at the End of the Light: Essays on Movies and Politics (Tin House Books) is the first book of nonfiction from one of our great fiction writers and a Publishers Weekly Best Essay Collection of Fall. In these ten essays Jim Shepard weaves close readings of film with cultural criticism to explore the ways in which movies work so ubiquitously to reflect how Americans think and act. Whether assessing the “high-spirited glee of American ruthlessness” captured in GoodFellas, or finding in Lawrence of Arabia “[a] portrait of the lunatic serenity of our leaders’ conviction in the face of all evidence and their own lack of knowledge,” he explores how we enter conversations with specific genres and films―Chinatown, The Third Man, and Badlands among others―in order to construct and refine our most cherished illusions about ourselves.
