You Think That’s Bad, By Jim Shepherd

Let’s talk about that title for a moment. Really, it could adorn any book filled with the stuff of short-story collections: heartbreak and, well, more heartbreak. But the characters in this Shepard collection have it really bad. The protagonist in “Minotaur” is lost in the “black world” of secret government projects and has a crumbling marriage. The engineer at the center of “The Netherlands Lives with Water” faces a flood of biblical proportions and a faltering union.

As in Shepard’s past stories, the characters are intelligent people who can’t quite figure out love, and that doubt cracks their confidence in all aspects of their lives. The difference in this book is how far and wide he searches for the characters in these stories. In “Gojira, King of the Monsters,” Tsuburaya builds a set model for the film in postwar Japan. In “Your Fate Hurtles Down at You,” a researcher in 1939 lives in the Swiss Alps, studying avalanches. In both of these stories, the tragedies that animate the characters hide in the background: Hiroshima and Nagasaki are recent memories for Tsuburaya, and the researcher’s brother was killed in an avalanche.

Though other short-story masters (George Saunders, A.M. Homes) are more formally inventive than Shepard, none—and we mean it—makes ambition appear so effortless. Research is often the secret ingredient to rich fiction, but it can also weigh a story down. Shepard packs so much history and empathy into each story, yet none of it feels crammed in there. And one more thing about that title: The dry, humorous shrug inherent in the phrase may be the one thing all of his varied characters have in common.