Event

Jim Shepard in conversation with Tobias Wolff

Peninsula Arts & Letters and Kepler's present Jim Shepard in conversation with Tobias Wolff

Monday, June 15, 2015
7:30pm

Kepler's Books
1010 El Camino Real
Menlo Park, CA 94025

From the hugely acclaimed National Book Award finalist, a novel that will join the shortlist of classics about the Holocaust and the children caught up in it, The Book of Aron by Jim Shepard.

Aron, the narrator, is an engaging if peculiar young boy whose family is driven from the countryside into the Warsaw Ghetto. As his family is slowly stripped away from him, Aron and a handful of boys and girls risk their lives, smuggling and trading things through the "quarantine walls" to keep their people alive, hunted all the while by blackmailers, the Gestapo and the police.

Jim Shepard has masterfully made this child's-eye view of the Warsaw Ghetto mesmerizing, sometimes comic despite all odds, and truly heartbreaking. It is nothing less than a masterpiece.

"The story of what happened to children in the Holocaust is not for the faint-hearted... Jim Shepard has written a Holocaust novel that stands with the most powerful writing on that terrible subject." John Irving

Jim Shepard was a finalist for the National Book Award. His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, McSweeney's, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, Esquire, among others.

Tobias Wolff is the highly-acclaimed author of The Barracks Thief, Old School, This Boy's Life and In Pharaoh's Army. His most recent collection of short stories, Our Story Begins, won The Story Prize for 2008. Other honors include the PEN/Malamud Award and the Rea Award - both for excellence in the short story - the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the PEN/Faulkner Award.

The event is free - please register today.