Batting Against Castro

by Jim Shepard

With his first collection of stories--some comic, others compassionate, all of them enthralling--Shepard again displays his prodigious writing talent. Ranging from winter-league baseball in pre-revolutionary Cuba to a postapocalyptic frontier in the American South, from the set of Murnau's classic horror film Nosferatu to more familiar scenes of family life, these 14 stories span an immense fictional landscape with great verve and humanity.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

197 pages, Hardcover

First published June 18, 1996

About the author

Jim Shepard is the author of seven novels, including most recently The Book of Aron, which won the Sophie Brody Medal for Achievement in Jewish Literature from the American Library Association and the PEN/New England Award for fiction, and five story collections, including his new collection, The World To Come. Five of his short stories have been chosen for the Best American Short Stories, two for the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and one for a Pushcart Prize. He teaches at Williams College.

Reviews

[Vincent Scarpa · Rating 4 out of 5]

The highlights here are “Mars Attacks,” “Runway,” and “Krakatau.” All three, excellent fucking stories.

[Julia Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

It would be a good Discovery Channel special, doctors opening up Jim Shepard's head and poking around in his mammoth, fact-filled brain.

Jim Shepard possesses a blistering intelligence, and in Batting Against Castro, his earliest collection of short stories, many of the obsessions he revisits in later stories are present - classic horror movies, natural disasters, sports, familial (especially fraternal) tension, angry boys in huge emotional trouble. He doesn't quite make the stratospheric leap that he achieves later with Like You'd Understand Anyway and You Think That's Bad, but with this collection he takes a big ole running jump.

Shepard is the king of voice, the undisputed champion of testosterone-fueled sports bluster. "Batting Against Castro" is one of my favorite short stories in which I understand very little (I know zilch about baseball), but still, I feel every emotional high point he hits in this story. "Messiah" more than presages "Trample the Dead, Hurdle the Weak" from a later collection. But the protagonist of "Piano Starts Here," a man in love, has little of Shepard's typical masculine bravado, and evolutionally feels somewhat early-Shepard. Ditto for the young boy in "Eustace" and the emotionally-withholding main character of "Runway."

Other stories feel like wonderful experiments. "Atomic Tourism" is equal parts suburban holiday malaise and speculative disaster fiction. I'm always impressed with his female characters, including the teenage female protagonist of "Spending the Night with the Poor." One can only imagine how much reading Shepard did to make "Nosferatu" and "Krakatau" fly. In those stories Shepard flexes that research muscle that gets used so much in his later work. This dude knows A LOT about classic horror movies and natural disasters. What might be surprising is the emotional resonance he's able to wring from the characters set in actual historical events.

Many of the stories in Batting Against Castro are reprinted in Love and Hydrogen, but this collection is still more than shelf-worthy.

Whenever you can, go listen to Jim Shepard read. He is a pitch-perfect performer whom everyone should experience at least once.

[Mitchell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jim Shepard is widely regarded alongside Tobias Wolff as one of America’s finest living short story writers. As with Wolff, he first came to my attention in university when I read his brilliant short story Love and Hydrogen, about a pair of clandestine lovers on the doomed voyage of the Hindenburg. As with Wolff, it’s somehow taken seven years for me to actually bother to find a full collection of his stories and read them.

Batting Against Castro is his first collection of stories, and while it’s good, it doesn’t quite reach the heights which I know his later work does. There are only two particularly good stories in here: Spending The Night With The Poor, an agonisingly awkward account of a teenage girl’s sleepover at her poverty-stricken friend’s house, and Mars Attacks, which recounts a man’s relationship with his troubled brother by describing the trading cards they collected as children which depicted a cartoonish assault on Earth by Martian invaders. Some of the stories are technically accomplished but left me feeling cold – I think Krakatau, the final story in the book, is probably an objectively great story, but the theme of troubled families had worn out its welcome by then. Similarly, there are some stories (such as the title one, which finds its American narrator literally batting against a young Fidel Castro when he plays baseball in pre-revolutionary Cuba) which are deeply immersed in the lore of American sports; as with the movie Field of Dreams, I suspect you kinda have to be American to get what they’re all about. But overall it was a decent first outing for Jim Shepard, and I’ll pick up his later books.

[Patrick McCoy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm a huge fan of the short stories of Jim Shepard, so I thought I'd search out his out-of-print, first collection of stories, Batting Against Castro (1996). I should have researched more about it, because there are only four stories that I hadn't read before: "Atomic Tourism," "Who We Are, What We're Doing," "Nosferatu," and "Ida." The rest ("Batting Against Castro," "Reach for the Sky," "Messiah," "Spending the Night with the Poor," "Eustace," "Mars Attacks," "Piano Starts Here," "Runaway," and "Krakatau") are included in his 2004 collection Love and Hydrogen. And there are certainly some gems among those reprinted stories. "Atomic Tourism" is a story about a couple who nonchalantly does some disaster tourism after America is nuked by the Russians. "Who We Are, What We're Doing" is a short story about jet pilots which employs the lingo of said pilots. "Nosferatu" reads like a fictional production diary of director F.W. Murnau during the making of his classic film of the same name. Incidentally, it seems that Shepard fleshed this story out to write a short novel of the same title, which was published in 1998. "Ida" is a metaphor of a family told through NFL football circa the late 70s as the protagonist quarterback and his mother are playing against the Steelers vaunted defense of the 70s and his mother continues to plow away at the defense by running the ball as instructed by the father (her husband) and the uncle. What the metaphor is supposed to represent is beyond me though. I can see why the publishers included so many of the stories from this collect in the next-they are many exceptional stories in this book.

[Ian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Early short story collection - I don't think it's his best, though some of his best stories are in here. I'd recommend springing for Love and Hydrogen (which reprints both "Mars Attacks!" and "Runway" and a whole of the rest of Batting Against Castro, to be honest). and the novel length version of Nosferatu instead, and then working your way back if you're into it.

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title story is one of the best short stories I've read in a LONG time.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I actually would only give this 3.5 stars, but he is such a good author he deserves to be rounded up to 4 even for a middle-of-the-road book. Read Jim Shepard!!

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

Rumor has it the New Yorker has developed a machine that cranks out stories like this, assigns prominent authorial names, and then publishes them without anyone noticing.

[Rick · Rating 2 out of 5]

Bridgeport, Connecticut is the birthplace of Jim Shepard and the Frisbee.
Both take easily to the wind.