How can literature help us extend our empathic imaginations? How can writing and reading expand our curiosity and compassion for people in situations distant from our own?

Jim Shepard is the author of seven previous novels, most recently The Book of Aron (winner of the 2016 PEN New England Award, the Sophie Brody medal for achievement in Jewish literature, the Ribalow Prize for Jewish literature, the Clark Fiction Prize, and a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award) and five story collections, including Like You’d Understand, Anyway, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and won The Story Prize. His short fiction has appeared in, among other magazines, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, Esquire, Tin House, Granta, Zoetrope, Electric Literature, and Vice, and has often been selected for The Best American Short Stories and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. He lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with his wife, three children, and three beagles, and he teaches film and creative writing at Williams College. His story “The World to Come” was adapted into a feature film starring Casey Affleck, Vanessa Kirby, and Katherine Waterston.

"What the arts offer is what kids need. Which is some kind of human companionship. Some sense that you're not alone out there. And certainly reading is on the decline, and that's a huge problem. I'm not willing to concede that we all should give up reading and critical thinking, but our culture is pushing us in that direction. I have three children five years apart. And the youngest is 21 years old and her connection to the phone is way more profound than the oldest one. We all are dependent on our phones now. But that sense we have that we need to be checking it all the time, that sense we have that we will not immerse ourselves in the arts anymore because there might be something on our phone we have to check, that's way more widespread now than it used to be."

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