Project X

Acclaim for Jim Shepard’s PROJECT X

“Project X is a savvy, sensitive take on the tortured inner lives of two eighth-grade boys—Hanratty and Flake, outcasts who plan a Columbine-like revenge on their unwitting school—that builds tension with unremitting skill.”

—Elle

“[Hanratty’s] turmoil proves to be an intense experience in anxiety recall: Your most frustrating teen memories will find unholy corroboration. Which makes Shepard’s intimacy with the bleeding psyche of misfitting adolescence all the more discomfiting—we’re so close, we feel the heft of the Kalashnikov.”

—The Village Voice

“Of all Shepard’s work, perhaps none blends fact and fiction more controversially than Project X. . . . [He] willfully defies the boundaries by which so much of our culture is defined. . . . Shepard, then, is a writer who, along with a small group of contemporaries, is reconfiguring how fiction works.”

—Los Angeles Times

“If Jim Shepard’s fiction carried a sign, it might say DANGER: EXPLOSIVES. As this riveting novel progresses, we find ourselves praying for Hanratty’s salvation—and our own.”

—O, The Oprah Magazine

“A feat of verisimilitude, with an inspired evocation of the caprices of adolescence, deftly tracing the fine line between idle pent-up angst and the kind that puts a gun in the hand of an eighth grader who might use it.”

— Esquire

“Project X truly ups the ante [in] dark realism and depth.”

—New York Magazine

“A feat of stunning imagination. . . . [Project X] leaves you with questions that you’ll ask yourself every time you see one of those kids who seem slightly out of place in school, at the mall, at church—or in your child’s bedroom.”

—The Kansas City Star

“Shepard puts us into the shoes of two boys with murder on their minds but not in their hearts. His compassion for them rings out like a shout—the kind no one hears until it’s too late.”

—Salon

“Shepard’s ear for the speech of today’s youth is remarkable. He has fashioned a kind of staccato poetry out of an often inchoate, vocabulary-poor manner of conveying, or avoiding communication. . . . [The] first-person, present-tense voice varies from deadpan humor to deadpan melancholy. Either way, his narration is unfailingly intense and captivating.”

—Newsday

“After all the hand-wringing and glib explanations for school shootings, Project X offers as clear a view as any into the minds of the kids who actually succumb to . . . a deadly impulse.”

—The Columbus Dispatch

“Unrelenting and touching. . . . There are scenes that remain haunting long after the book is done. . . . [A] sensitive and unflinching novel.”

— The Anniston Star

“[Hanratty] is vulnerable, funny, sullen and heartbreaking.”

—Austin American-Statesman