Trujillo
by Lucius Shepard
A short story collection, which contains the novel Trujillo.
Lucius Shepard is widely regarded as the finest short fiction writer in the SF and Fantasy fields today. His famously eloquent and moody style, his masterly evocations of exotic places, his volatile and alienated protagonists, his astonishing renderings of doomful epiphany and ambiguous transcendence: all these have for two decades combined to make Shepard a dark fantasist of rare distinction.
In the last few years, Shepard has been utterly inspired, producing story after brilliant story. Now Trujillo – his biggest and best collection to-date – assembles the cream of this extraordinary output: one novel, six novellas, and four novelettes, all of them portals into the most extreme and terrifying possibilities of contemporary existence.
Discover here a Russian nightclub that is also a metaphysical kingdom, the realm of terminal disillusionment; encounter here the strange ghosts and apocalypses latent in the War on Terror; read here of prison as Purgatory, of UFOs as emblems of criminal despair, of the merciless imperatives of evolution emerging from African jungles to remake the human race.
And explore here, in five especially intense tales, the seedy yet magical precincts of Trujillo, where native Hondurans and expatriate Americans alike confront the illusory, demonic, and uncertainly redemptive essentials of memory and the human soul.
Trujillo is an unforgettable cornucopia of vision and violence – the story collection of the year.
Contents:
- Introduction by Michael Swanwick
- Trujillo (novel)
- Only Partly Here
- Hands Up! Who Wants to Die?
- The Same Old Story
- A Walk in the Garden
- Eternity and Afterward
- Jailwise
- Crocodile Rock
- The Drive-In Puerto Rico
- The Park Sweeper
- Señor Volto
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Lucius Shepard
Lucius Shepard (1947–2014) was an American writer. Classified as a science fiction and fantasy writer, he often leaned into other genres, such as magical realism. His work is infused with a political and historical sensibility and an awareness of literary antecedents.
Brief biographies are, like history texts, too organized to be other than orderly misrepresentations of the truth. So when it's written that Lucius Shepard was born in August of 1947 to Lucy and William Shepard in Lynchburg, Virginia, and raised thereafter in Daytona Beach, Florida, it provides a statistical hit and gives you nothing of the difficult childhood from which he frequently attempted to escape, eventually succeeding at the age of fifteen, when he traveled to Ireland aboard a freighter and thereafter spent several years in Europe, North Africa, and Asia, working in a cigarette factory in Germany, in the black market of Cairo's Khan al Khalili bazaar, as a night club bouncer in Spain, and in numerous other countries at numerous other occupations. On returning to the United States, Shepard entered the University of North Carolina, where for one semester he served as the co-editor of the Carolina Quarterly. Either he did not feel challenged by the curriculum, or else he found other pursuits more challenging. Whichever the case, he dropped out several times and traveled to Spain, Southeast Asia (at a time when tourism there was generally discouraged), and South and Central America. He ended his academic career as a tenth-semester sophomore with a heightened political sensibility, a fairly extensive knowledge of Latin American culture and some pleasant memories.
