More than most American fiction writers Jim Shepard has demonstrated an ardent and informed interest in the cinema, science, technology, warfare, and history. In an interview for Tin House magazine in 2003, I asked him why he was attracted to such material, and he answered that he thought it was “because first of all, it’s a way of enlarging my contact with the world, and secondly because it’s a way of enlarging the arena of my autobiographical obsessions. It’s a way to fiddle with and expand what we might call the ground: that element in our work that proscribes all our choices. I guess I’m looking to complicate my memory, and complicate the categorical narrowness of my intellectual discipline.”

Shepard wondered if many contemporary writers avoid historical material because “they worry about the issue of authority, forgetting, perhaps, that that issue—the issue of the essential chutzpah involved in trying to imagine any other kind of sensibility—is always with us. Really: where do we get the authority to write from the point of view of anyone, other than ourselves? The whole project of literature is about the exercise of the empathetic imagination. Why were we given something as amazing as imagination, if we’re not going to use it?”

In fact, some initial reviewers of Nosferatu were so unaware of the wide extent of Shepard’s imaginary constructions that various journal entries in the novel, letters to and from Hans, and other completely persuasive episodes that have such a deep feeling for the odd, disillusioned, decadent life in postwar Germany were assumed to be real historical documents, but those invented scenes were simply indebted to scrupulous research into the period.

On the one hand, Shepard told me, a historical novelist has the advantage of being “given characters and a situation; on the other hand, you’re provided with all these constraints, as well. I think those fiction writers who deal with history the most effectively … have an understanding that (A) fiction about real events needs to respect the facts, and (B) as our politicians have taught us, facts are malleable things. The trick, I guess, is to do everything possible to honor A as you understand it, while taking full advantage of B to shape your material into something aesthetically beautiful.”