Source: Solid Objects press release Special Thanks to Max Winter and Brad Warner

Solid Objects, a newly launched fiction, drama, poetry, and nonfiction publisher based in New York, will release the novella Gojira, King of the Monsters on November 8th. Written by Jim Shepard, the book presents a fictionalized account on the personal and professional struggles of special effects director Eiji Tsuburaya during the production of the original GODZILLA (Gojira, 1954). Jim Shepard is the author of numerous novels and short stories, including the collections Like You’d Understand, Anyway; Love and Hydrogen; and Batting Against Castro, as well as the novels Project X and Nosferatu. He has won the Story Prize and been nominated for the National Book Award. He lives in Massachusetts and teaches at Williams College. Gojira, King of the Monsters By Jim Shepard Paperback 56 pages $12 5" by 7" Cover design by Michael Kupperman ISBN 978-0-9844142-1-5 Gojira, King of the Monsters can be ordered directly from Solid Objects (with free shipping and handling) or through Small Press Distribution and Amazon.com. “A perfect embodiment of mid-20th-century anxiety, Gojira, King of the Monsters touches on hubris and nuclear testing, lunatic perfectionism and fire-tornadoes and the schisms wrought by grief and silence. In Jim Shepard’s deft and darkly brilliant tale about the Master of Miniatures behind a legendary film, the complexities of creating a monster and shooting special effects resonate exactly with one man’s inner life. No one writes like Shepard, quietly layering loss over loss—and no one orchestrates catastrophe better.”—Andrea Barrett “Avid readers of Jim Shepard’s fiction will find much to love in Gojira, King of the Monsters. As in Nosferatu, with its smartly imagined life of the German film director F. W. Murnau, here Shepard considers the Japanese special effects director Eiji Tsuburaya and his cinematic inventions for the science-fiction movie we know as GODZILLA. And like many of Shepard’s stories, Gojira limns the intense and alienated world of a focused expert obsessed by his field of endeavor, at a cost to his marriage and children. For Japanese survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the 1950s, America itself seemed king of the monsters, to be looked at with fear and awe. It’s a poignant and important story that seems to me a summation and condensation of many themes that have preoccupied Shepard before. Like a diamond held aloft, each turn of this tale in his deft hand flashes still more light.”—Ron Hansen