Sam Shepard

From one of our most admired writers: a collection of stories set mainly in the fertile imaginative landscape of the American West, written with the terse lyricism, cinematic detail, and wry humor that have become Sam Shepard's trademarks.A man traveling down Highway 90 West gets trapped alone overnight inside a Cracker Barrel restaurant, where he is tormented by an endless loop of Shania Twain songs on the overhead sound system. A wandering actor returns to his hometown against his better instincts and runs into an old friend, who recounts their teenage days of stealing cars, scoring Benzedrine, and sleeping with whores in Tijuana. A Minnesota family travels south for a winter vacation but, caught up in the ordinary tyrannies of family life, remains oblivious to the beauty of the Yucatan Peninsula. A solitary horse rancher muses on Sitting Bull and Beckett amid the jumble of stuff in his big country kitchen--from rusted spurs and Lakota dream-catchers to yellowing pictures of hawks and galloping horses to "snapshots of different sons in different shirts doing different things like fishing, riding mules and tractors; leaning up against their different mothers at radical angles."Made up of short narratives, lyrics, and dialogues, Day out of Days sets conversation against tale, song against memory, in a cubistic counterpoint that finally links each piece together. The result is a stunning work of vision and clarity imbued with the vivid reverberations of myth--Shepard at his flinty-eyed, unwavering best.From the Hardcover edition.

"A solitary man digs a hole in the ground, near a dead horse. Amid the clutter of food and equipment stands Hobart Struther, who has ridden all the way out to the middle of nowhere on a holy mission. But one day into his "grand sojourn," things are looking bleak. His horse has choked to death, he's miles away from civilization, and there's not a person around to talk to - other than himself. As Hobart examines his rise - how he built a vast art collection while ensconced in a comfortable Park Avenue lifestyle - he digs deep into his own history, unearthing truths about his past while still struggling to find the answers he needs."--Jacket.

Pulitzer Prize winner Sam Shepard's latest play is an uproarious, brilliantly provocative farce that brings the gifts of a quintessentially American playwright to bear on the current American dilemma.Frank and Emma are a quiet, respectable couple who raise cows on their Wisconsin farm. Soon after they agree to put up Frank's old friend Haynes, who is on the lam from a secret government project involving plutonium, they're visited by Welch, an unctuous government bureaucrat from hell. His aggressive patriotism puts Frank, Emma, and Haynes on the defensive, transforming a heartland American household into a scene of torture and promoting a radioactive brand of conformity with a dangerously long half life.From the Trade Paperback edition.

The Woman Lady Henrietta Maclellan longs for the romantic swirl of a London season. But as a rusticating country maiden, she has always kept her sensuous nature firmly under wraps -- until she meets Simon Darby. Simon makes her want to whisper promises late at night, exchange kisses on a balcony, receive illicit love notes. So Henrietta lets her imagination soar and writes... The Letter A very steamy love letter that becomes shockingly public. Everyone supposes that he has written it to her, but the truth hardly matters in the face of the scandal to come if they don't marry at once. But nothing has quite prepared Henrietta for the pure sensuality of... The Man Simon has vowed he will never turn himself into a fool over a woman. So, while debutantes swoon as he disdainfully strides past the lovely ladies of the ton, he ignores them all... until Henrietta. Could it be possible that he has been the foolish one all along?

A powerful, yet funny confrontation between two brothers set in the contemporary West.

"In these eighteen stories, Sam Shepard taps the same wellsprings that have made him one of our most acclaimed - and distinctly American - playwrights: sex and regret, the yearning for a frontier that has been subdivided out of existence, the comic gulf of misapprehension between men and women, and the even deeper gulf that separates men from their true selves.". "A fascinated boy watches the grim contest between a "remedy man" - a fixer of bad horses - and a spectacularly bad-tempered stallion, a contest that mirrors the boy's own struggle with his father. A suburban husband starts his afternoon shopping for basil for a party and ends it holding one of the guests at gunpoint in the basement. Two old men, who have lived together companionably since their wives died or left them and their children scattered to "silicon computer hell," are brought to grief by a waitress at the local Denny's."--BOOK JACKET.

"These three plays by Sam Shepard are bold, explosive, and ultimately redemptive dramas propelled by family secrets and illuminated by a searching intelligence. In The Late Henry Moss - which premiered in San Francisco, starring Sean Penn and Nick Nolte - two estranged brothers confront the past as they piece together the drunken fishing expedition that preceded their father's death. In Eyes for Consuela, based on Octavio Paz's classic story "The Blue Bouquet," a vacationing American encounters a knife-toting Mexican bandit on a gruesome quest. And in When the World Was Green, cowritten with Joseph Chaikin, a journalist in search of her father interviews an old man who resolved a generations-old vendetta by murdering the wrong man. Together, these plays form a powerful trio from an enduring force in American theater."--BOOK JACKET.

From the intensely admired Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright-actor-musician-writer-ex-cowboy, a burst of pure storytelling: forty swiftly told tales in the unmistakable voice of Sam Shepard. Terse, lyric, alive, these tales range in key from the sad to the hilarious. Some are rounded stories, some are miniatures, some are dialogues at once cryptic and mesmerizing, some are excerpts from an actor's diary. Together they present their author's singular vision of ancestry and childhood, sexual passion and betrayal, family and fame, in a voice as spare as an Arizona mesa, as quintessentially American as a forties jazz song. Cruising Paradise is a book that locates places where our culture is defined - and at the same time brings us closer than we have yet been to a writer who has become synonymous with the recklessness, stoicism, and solitude of American manhood.

Also contains The War in Heaven, Angel's Monologue by Joseph Chaikin and Sam Shepard.

Presents seven dark works by American playwright Sam Shepard, which span 1968-1981 and deal with such themes as family disturbances and the loss of American myths; includes "Buried Child" and "Curse of the Starving Class."