Those signposts don’t exist in the realm of short fiction, which is a genre Shepard continues returning to, in part because of his affinity for leanness, and in part because he enjoys “the guerilla aspect” of the form. “There’s a lot of what I call furniture moving in novel writing that I get quite impatient with. I love the idea that you hit the ground running.”

Of course, the very fact the writer hits the ground running, covers a brief distance, then stops is precisely one of the aspects of the short form that turns readers off. Shepard readily acknowledges that readers feel they don’t have time with a short story to make the kind of emotional investment that a novel affords, which is one reason stories are paradoxically unpopular in an age of constant distraction and short attention spans.

“One of the other things that’s operating that I think publishers forget,” Shepard continues, “is short stories seem very close in the reader’s mind to medicine. It’s very close to poetry. Or Literature with a capital ‘L.’ [Readers] think, this is going to be a little bit more oblique, this is going to be a little bit more difficult, a little bit more modernist, and I’m going to feel a little stupid, maybe, and who needs it?”

That said, one other signature facet of Shepard’s writing – the novels and, especially, the stories – is a staunch refusal to dumb itself down, a tactic that seems almost counterintuitive in our current anti-intellectual climate. “I always trust my readers to infer way more than other writers do,” Shepard says.

That is a large investment of trust, given the relative difficulty of Shepard’s fiction. It feels in some ways as though the title of the author’s National Book Award–nominated 2007 story collection, Like You’d Understand, Anyway is a rebuke to the culture at large. “One of my students told her mother that I had a new collection out,” Shepard recalls. “And her mother said, ‘Oh, what’s it called? Maybe I’ll get it.’ And the student said, ‘Like You’d Understand, Anyway.’ And the mother said, ‘Well, I might!'”

Yet for all its intellectual rigour, for all the evident research and erudition that goes into the work, it is the emotional connection that sparks Shepard’s fiction. Absent that emotional trigger, the author says he would not be able to find a way into the work. Returning to Shepard’s preferred beach reading, it is not the history of the French Terror itself, horrendously compelling though it may be, that provokes a story. It is always something much more specific, and more resonant.

In the case of “Sans Farine,” which is included in Like You’d Understand, Anyway, it was a detail about a hereditary executioner – “That already interests me: how do you get that job? How did a family end up with that?” – who complained to one of the French monarchs that his clothes were wearing out too quickly on account of all the blood they were becoming saturated with. “And I thought, what kind of a person complains about that? And in what way? The idea that you would be so good at self-pity that even as a mass murderer, you would think that you were the one beset … That I felt like I could relate to emotionally.”

The kind of miniaturism contained in this attitude is not to suggest that even Shepard is immune to feeling intimidated by the scope of his ongoing project. “The hubris involved with what I’m doing a lot of the time is fairly staggering,” Shepard says. “To me, anyway.” One of the reasons the author gives for defaulting to the first person in the majority of his work is that it is one way of tackling the hubris head on. “I was trying to write years ago about Aeschylus and I was trying to do so in a detached third person and it was a miserable failure. And finally I got so upset with myself that I thought, you know what, just head on: if you can’t finish a sentence that begins, ‘I am Aeschylus,’ then you should just stop doing it.”