Batting Against Castro: Stories

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Ranging from winter-league baseball in prerevolutionary Cuba to a postapocalyptic frontier in the American South, from the set of Murnau's classic horror film Nosferatu to more familiar (if no less inventive) scenes of family life, these fourteen stories - some comic, others compassionate, every one enthralling - span an immense fictional landscape with great verve and humanity, humor and wisdom. And Shepard's richly diverse characters - the boy who locks himself inside his Catholic school in a vague protest ...
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More About This Book

Overview

Ranging from winter-league baseball in prerevolutionary Cuba to a postapocalyptic frontier in the American South, from the set of Murnau's classic horror film Nosferatu to more familiar (if no less inventive) scenes of family life, these fourteen stories - some comic, others compassionate, every one enthralling - span an immense fictional landscape with great verve and humanity, humor and wisdom. And Shepard's richly diverse characters - the boy who locks himself inside his Catholic school in a vague protest against injustices he can neither comprehend nor cope with, the father whose reckless fixation ultimately threatens the children he so loves, the postdoctoral fellow whose obsessive study of volcanoes mirrors his futile attempts to understand his brother's explosive psyche, the fighter pilot who considers pulling eight g's as "the real thing, the difference between thinking about kissing and kissing" - combine the ordinary, the bizarre, and the heroic to stunning effect.
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Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
A memorable cast of characters faces various forms of alienation-psychological, political, physical, economic, social-in 14 alternately humorous and poignant short stories from novelist Shepard. Writing mostly in the first-person, Shepard crafts an astonishing assortment of utterly convincing voices. An apolitical American baseball player finds himself playing in Cuba during Castro's rise. A fighter pilot expounds on the rarefied thrills of flying F-15s. Spending the night with a friend from dance class, a privileged young girl struggles to endure less affluent surroundings. Legendary director F.W. Murnau chronicles his physical and emotional hardships during the shooting of Nosferatu. A self-reliant adult son feels marginalized by the mental illness of his brother. A troubled boy imagines his mother as the Vikings' workhorse running back, himself behind center while his father calls ineffective plays from the sideline as the bruising 1975 Steeler defense batters them after every snap. The division of stories into sections titled "Strangers" and "Family" proves an unfortunate editorial choice that unbalances the collection, but each of these seamless, insightful narratives stands vividly on its own. One hopes that this collection will send readers in search of Shepard's fine novels (Kiss of the Wolf; Lights Out in the Reptile House, etc.) (June)
Library Journal
Shepard, author of the shrewd and well-received Kiss of the Wolf (LJ 12/93), delivers in his first short story collection 14 wonderful snapshots. Organized into two sections, "Strangers" and "Family," they range in setting from the title story's 1951 Cuba (where, by the way, Shepard assumes the designated hitter rule was in effect) to the set of F.W. Murnau's 1922 horror classic Nosferatu, with Murnau narrating. These pieces excel as short fiction, although they could also be germs for novels. The real winner here is the grimly bizarre "Ida," where a boy finds himself quarterbacking a nightmare version of the 1975 NFL championship game, with his father coaching on the sidelines and sending his mother on 70 brutal carries in his backfield. Intelligent and imaginative, this is highly recommended, especially for large story collections.Robert E. Brown, Onondaga Cty. P.L., Syracuse, N.Y.
School Library Journal
YA-The title story in this collection starts a lineup of 14 tales with a "life's tough" theme. In it, two U.S. baseball players have chosen to improve their mediocre skills by playing for Cuba. They arrive at a time when nationalism wears a rumpled jersey with either Batista or Castro's name, and power is tossed around like dust whisked off an umpire's uniform. Conflict in the other stories includes a humane-society worker who chisels at the emotions of recalcitrant pet owners; a child who knows that poverty isn't contagious but breaks off a friendship with a poor classmate; a couple who wander the country searching for peace after an atomic disaster; and people who want to heal their dysfunctional families but can't. Batting against irascible inner voices and social mores is the destiny of the characters in a book that uses backdrops as metaphorical as volcanic mountaintops and as unassuming as a college campus. This would be a mixed bag of short stories except they are all dark, a quality that some YAs seek.-Karen Sokol, Fairfax County Public Schools, VA
Kirkus Reviews
With four fine novels (Kiss of the Wolf, 1994, etc.) to his credit, Shepard seems to be something of a writer's writer—he's rightly admired by critics and his peers, but a wider readership has yet to develop.

This first collection of 14 expert tales could easily be the work to gain Shepard greater visibility—it's smart, economical, and each story displays that most elusive quality: integrity. The volume is divided into two sections, one on "strangers," the other on "family." The first group impresses with its wide array of distinctive, convincing voices. In the title story, a former major-league ballplayer takes a job in pre-revolutionary Cuba, where the championship series prefigures the Cold War. Another jock, the narrator of "Messiah," unsparingly describes his maniacal teammate, a female-abusing, violent superstar. A short piece, "Reach for the Sky," unerringly brings to life an animal- shelter worker who thanklessly deals with the erstwhile owners of abandoned dogs; another captures the self-defining lingo of fighter pilots ("Who We Are, What We're Doing"). Other voices Shepard channels include a clueless adolescent girl on a mission to uplift a poor friend ("Spending the Night with the Poor"), and in a memoiristic tale, German director F.W. Murnau during the making of his epochal film Nosferatu. The stories in the family section explore such things as the nature and particulars of growing up ethnic and Catholic, the struggles to communicate within a family, and the painful loss of loved ones. The effect of an Italian grandmother's death is traced in "Touch of the Dead"; "Eustace" is nothing less than a Catholic version of Philip Roth's great story "Conversion of the Jews": A parochial schoolboy infuriates nuns with his persistent, troubling questions. And "Mars Attacks," one of several wrenching pieces about brothers, uses a wrangle over that infamous trading-card series to chronicle the difficult relations of two siblings.

A virtuoso collection.

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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780679446682
  • Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
  • Publication date: 6/18/1996
  • Edition number: 1
  • Pages: 224
  • Product dimensions: 5.84 (w) x 8.59 (h) x 0.87 (d)

Table of Contents

Batting Against Castro 3
Reach for the Sky 23
Messiah 29
Spending the Night with the Poor 39
Atomic Tourism 53
Who We Are, What We're Doing 65
Nosferatu 69
Eustace 101
The Touch of the Dead 117
Mars Attacks 125
Ida 143
Piano Starts Here 151
Runway 165
Krakatau 179
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