Jim Shepherd’s 2007 short story collection, Like You’d Understand Anyway, was a finalist for the National Book Award and it’s easy to see why. It is a masterly collection of stories that range from heartfelt and painful tales of adolescence (“Proto-Scorpions of the Silurian,” ”Trample the Dead, Hurdle the Weak,” and “Courtesy For Beginners”) to exhaustively realistically researched historical tales of the past (Roman soldiers-“Hadarian’s Wall,” Nazi naturalists chasing Yetis-“Ancestral Legacies,” explorers in Australia-“The First South Central Australian Expedition,” Greeks at war-“My Aeschylus,” French Jacobin executioners-“Sans Farine”). Shepard infuses his characters with insight and humanity that brings the historical characters to life and allows us to imagine what it might have been like to have been living in those time periods. These stories were well-crafted and stayed in my consciousness long after reading. I feel the need to search out more of his work after reading this impressive collection.