Safety Tips for Living Alone (Kindle Single) (Electric Literature's Recommended Reading Book 133)

An Amazon.com Best Book of the Month (December 2014)

From one of our greatest living storytellers, a remarkable, gut-wrenching tale of love, duty, and peril set at the height of the Cold War.

In “Safety Tips for Living Alone,” Jim Shepard weaves the stories of four families whose lives are upended when the men go to work on a dangerous and isolated surveillance platform off the coast of Long Island. After working his way up to Captain, career serviceman Gordon Phelan is offered the command of Texas Tower 4—a wobbly “box over the ocean.” Among the team of military personnel and civilians joining Phelan aboard the platform are Roy Bakke, Wilbur Kovarick and Louie Laino, three strong and dutiful men trying to ensure better lives for their families. But when a powerful storm approaches the Tower, the four men—and everyone on board—must face their increasingly probable deaths.

In his introduction, Joshua Ferris writes “There’s no better way to describe the experience of the reader of Shepard’s reimagining of this forgotten, misbegotten episode in American history” than to say one is “moved and appalled.”

About the Author: Jim Shepard is the author of seven novels, including the forthcoming The Book of Aron, and four 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, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Tin House, the New Yorker, Granta, Zoetrope: All Story , and Playboy, and five of his stories have been chosen for the Best American Short Stories, two for the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and one for a Pushcart Prize. He teaches at Williams College.

About the Guest Editor: Joshua Ferris is the bestselling author of three novels, Then We Came to the End, The Unnamed and To Rise Again at a Decent Hour. He was a finalist for the National Book Award, winner of the Barnes and Noble Discover Award and the PEN/Hemingway Award, and was named one of The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40”writers in 2010. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, and Best American Short Stories. He lives in New York.

About the Publisher: Electric Literature is an independent publisher amplifying the power of storytelling through digital innovation. Electric Literature’s weekly fiction magazine, Recommended Reading, invites established authors, indie presses, and literary magazines to recommended great fiction. Once a month we feature our own recommendation of original, previously unpublished fiction.