If you're in the Boston area and have a chance to see Jim Shepard read either tonight at Newtonville Books or tomorrow night at Harvard Bookstore, do so! Not only is he an incredible writer and his new collection, You Think That's Bad, one of the best short story collections I've read in recent years, but he's a very entertaining reader of his work. Even more, he's a great guy and generous with students, as we found this past April when he accepted my invitation to visit Suffolk University to give a reading from the new book and meet with creative writing students. Go see him read. Buy the book. Read stories about apocalyptic floods in the Netherlands, the invention of the Godzilla monster, the 15th century mass murderer Gilles de Rais, and many others, and marvel at his ability to be so damn convincing about all of it.