Product Description
Brilliant, prolific, uniquely American, Pulitzer prizewinning playwright Sam Separd is a major voice in contemporary theatre.And here are seven of his very best.

"One of the most original, prolific and gifted dramatists at work today."—The New Yorker

"The greatest American playwright of his generation...the most inventive in language and revolutionary in craft, [he] is the writer whose work most accurately maps the interior and exterior landscapes of his society."—New York Magazine

"If plays were put in time capsules, future generations would get a sharp-toothed profile of life in the U.S. in the past decade and a half from the works of Sam Shepard."—Time

"Sam Shepard is the most exciting presence in the movie world and one of the most gifted writers ever to work on the American stage."—Marsha Norman, Pulitzer prizewinning author of ‘Night, Mother.

"One of our best and most challenging playwrights...his plays are a form of exorcism: magical, sometimes surreal rituals that grapple with the demonic forces in the American landscape."—Newsweek

"His plays are stunning in thier originality, defiant and inscrutable."—Esquire

"Sam Shepard is phenomenal..the best practicing American playwright."—The New Republic ... Read more

Customer Reviews (14)

The best and most essential Shepard collection
This collection features his finest and most mature work (Buried Child, Curse, True West) plus the best of his earlier plays (La Turista, The Tooth of Crime).They all showcase his great humor and startling use of language and imagery.Th more mature works deal, unflinchingly with american families. Tongues and Savage Love, which he did in collaboration with Joseph Chaiken, are wonderful, poetic meditations of existence and identity.If you are interested in Shepard as a playwright this is the finest collection of his best work.After this, I recommend seeking out the plays Fool for Love and A Lie of the Mind, for more of his "mature" work and then also Angel City as another prime example of the imaginative flights he took with his earlier work.In case you don't already know, Shepard is one of the most important American playwrights.Period.

Genius
Takes the ruins and all the infinite detritus that is modern America and transforms them into an art that is both timely and mythic, and always genuinely American. One of those few writers who brings his work directly from the depths of his own mangled innards.

Marvelous plays
I bought this book for a play reading group. I read a number of the plays, and ended up choosing "Curse of the Starving Class," which has some fascinating and memorable characters.It is a difficult play, but the group liked it.Sam Shepard is a great playwright.

When He Wrote Plays
American playwrights aren't good at creating a career of playwriting. Why, I can't say. They write dynamically for a given period and then off they go into putting the holy bible on stage or some such epic. They become mystics, like Allen Ginsberg. Shepard wrote plays for a while and then, I think, Hollywood put the zap on him and he was gone. His occasional pieces today are weak imitations of his former self. Money and fame may be responsible. Who knows? Here gathered in a single anthology are the key works, on which his life's reputation rests. "True West" sets the stage: we have real dramatic conflict, exciting dialog (of the sort last heard in Albee's "Zoo Story"), and high theatricality. The rest of the anthology is well worth reading, but for my money Shepard wrote a fine short play but his long and longer pieces are less interesting. Shepard has said in interviews that he sees plays as an outlet for ideas. The problem as I see it is that he has none.

best of Shepard...
I like to call this collection Best of Shepard Vol. 1. This collection belongs in any actors collection. Sam Shepard is a true, unique American voice. His eccentric characters, sparse writing and classic plays. I've seen "Buried Child" on-Broadway and scenes from "Buried Child", "Curse of the Starving Class", "Savage Love" and "True West" in countless acting classes. One of America's greatest writers.


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Product Description
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 Yucatán 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. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (10)

Shepard Conjures Hemingway
You're no Hemingway.It's the old writer's lament. At some point all writers come to terms with the fact that they're not Hemingway.As successful as you get, you're still no Papa. I don't think Shepard ever had to come to this conclusion.Page after page, I couldn't help but make Hemingway comparisons.The best writers are able to say a whole lot with just a few words.With a couple hundred words, Shepard creates full worlds with rich scenes, emotional complexity, and questions that somehow have answers. At times, his sparse writing left the sense of desert sand on my lips. At other times it left the sense of loss and regret in my gut. Quite remarkable.

Chris Bowen
Author ofOur Kids: Building Relationships in the Classroom

Ruminations in Fiction
I think Sam Shepard is underrated.His fiction writing is very much like his playwriting and his acting -- it all has that reflective, laconic sincerity.

To say this is fiction is misleading.It's mostly written in the first person, as autobiography, not of facts and events, but of thoughts.Many of the thoughts have to do with wandering.Many have to do with frustration with other people, especially women, but also of being unworthy of them -- an inconsistency that is just plain real.There's an impressive sincerity to Shephard's reporting of his thoughts about himself, other people, his and their faults, . . .

It's all rumination.Some of it is sad, some of it is wistful, and some of it is just rumination.If your favorite part of a baseball game is the time between the pitches, then you'll like Sam Shepard.

two words -Who Cares!
The only appeal of this book is that the unique paper the pages are made of will burn really well in the pyre. This book is a self-indulgent collection of unconnected pieces with no apparent purpose.Thus the title of my review. Who Cares!I would suggest anyone considering this book look at some of this acclaimed writers other works. I wish I could point to one or two of the short pieces in collection and comment positively.I cannot.

Celebrity Writer Gets Lazy
My all male book club was excited to read this. I think the nostalgic "boy on horse" cover appealed to the group as well. We usually pick one book out a presentation for five or six. Last night we had our meeting about the book and it was voted The Worst Book Ever by the group. Everyone hated it.
Admittedly, Mr Shepard is a good and proven writer (probably why we voted for it in the first place), but the consensus was these are notes for possible stories, not stories. True, it's very "cool" to write short plotless fiction but for the reader (unless you happen to be a recent college graduate and still remember your class in Experimental Fiction) it's highly unsatisfying. I think we would have preferred a memoir, and as a group we're not fond of memoir. While many of the pieces have a strong voice and some excellent description, the idea of investing in trying to understand or appreciate a voice when it's going to end in half a page is not a pleasurable activity. Perhaps if you love poetry you could more easily jump into these "prose poems", but we all know if he had called it a book of prose poems it woudn't have sold so well, would it? People like stories. Poetry is a niche. And those there are cowboy poets, I doubt if any of them would have liked these either.
So, Mr Shepard, we're disappointed. We held up your book jacket photo, the one where you are smirking, and assumed you were smirking on us, gullible non-celebs who trust, who buy and come back and buy again. By the way, people brought some of the rave reviews of this book published in major media and we all did a lot more than smirk at those. We laughed. Hard.
PS - most of the characters you play in movies, like the general in Black Hawk Down, would have laughed with us not at us.

Dry, Gritty, Searching
I felt a sense of guilt as I started reading this collection of short stories by Sam Shepard. It seemed as if I was reading someone's journal, their diary, with all their personal ramblings being exposed to me, a stranger. I got over that, and went on to really enjoy this collection that contains very short stories, snippets of conversations, memories, poems, observations, and random musings. Shepard writes in the voice of a distant loner, hardened by truth and reality but still seeking, looking for a kind of lost artifact or talisman.

Some of the poems have titles, but most are simple and unadorned. Without the title (and sometimes without punctuation) you are left to figure out the point, and each reader could likely come away with a different impression.

Horses racing men
Mummies on the mend
What's all this gauze bandaging
Unraveled down the stairs
Has come apart
In here
Something without end (p. 126)

In "Rosebud, South Dakota (Highway 83 North)" he describes a deceptively simple scene:

Lakota church, "Open to Anyone", it says, but no one's here. Not a single sorry soul. And it's the Sabbath too. Imagine that. Sunday abandoned. Just constant wind ripping across the tattered yards and buried fences. Constant endless prairie breath. Like it's always been. Now and evermore. Unrelenting. Raw. And could care less about the state of the Union.

Shepard's subjects are dry, tired, lost, searching, guilty, sarcastic, sardonic, and grim. They inhabit truck stops, rest stops, desert paths and windy valleys. Remarkably, reading these doesn't feel depressing or dispiriting. Instead, it's almost like putting a story behind that stranger you noticed outside the diner's plate glass window, or hitchhiking outside of town, or passing you on the open rural road in that old dirty Ford pickup.



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Product Description
In eighteen stories unlike any in our contemporary literature, Sam Shepard explores the vast and rugged American West with the same parched intensity that has made him “the great playwright of his generation” (The New York Times).

A boy watches a “remedy man” tame a wild stallion, a contest that mirrors his own struggle with his father. A woman driving her mother’s ashes across the country has a strangely transcendent run-in with an injured hawk. Two aging widowers, in Stetsons and bolo ties, together make a daily pilgrimage to the local Denny’s, only to be divided by the attentions of their favorite waitress. Peering unblinkingly into the chasms that separate fathers and sons, husbands and wives, friends and strangers, these powerful tales bear the unmistakable signature of an American master.Amazon.com Review
In his second collection of short fiction, Great Dream of Heaven, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Sam Shepard offers a resonant examination of interpersonal crisis and revelation in 18 lean tales. At times humorous, tense, and tragic, these stories often focus on the elusive search for connection and understanding, visiting characters at key moments of consciousness or detachment. Seized by compulsion or repression, many in this work disengage from life by assuming familiar roles or patterns.In "The Stout of Heart," a man obsessed with horse breeding locks himself in his room annually to study catalogues, shutting out his family, while in "An Unfair Question," another man's frustration with his role as husband and father surfaces when he engages a party guest in friendly conversation and ends up holding her at gunpoint.These stories achieve an understated impact due in part to Shepard's knack for acute dialogue and descriptions that reveal his dramatist's eye for sparse but evocative detail. In "Living the Sign," a handmade sign in a fast food restaurant inspires a man to self-awareness, though he finds that its teenage creator is only dimly aware of its significance."The Remedy Man," the collection's first and strongest story, tells of a guarded boy who comes to realize his potential by helping E.V., the road-worn title character (a fixer of bad horses), break a stallion."Horse is just like a human being," E.V. tells him. "He's just gotta know his limits.Once he finds that out he's a happy camper."Offering many such moments of distilled wisdom, the stories in Great Dream of Heaven are no less brief but memorable encounters. --Ross Doll ... Read more

Customer Reviews (8)

Handsome Is As Handsome Does?
A little too slick, a little too quick. There are eighteen stories in this collection and they all read like magazine short-shorts, so I'm surprised to note that only two of them were first printed in mags. I catch myself thinking, invidiously, that Sam Shepard is just too good-looking to write a powerful story, but then I recall that he's really a very fine playwright, possibly the best in the USA. I first saw True West on stage a good 25 years ago, with Ed Harris playing the lead, and I can't think of any American stage play that has delivered as much punch. None of the stories in "Great Dream of Heaven" have that sort of impact. Shepard is as good an actor as any, and a guy on the right side of a lot of social issues, so I feel presumptuous NOt finding his stories very solid. I have to wonder why he bothers to write them; he plainly doesn't need the trivial income or the plaudits.

It's not that the stories are badly crafted. If anything, they're technically glib. Almost all of them portray moments of failure, epiphanies of emptiness, in the lives of vulnerable losers like the majority of "us". Shepard seems possibly to have been influenced by short-story 'specialist' Raymond Carver; both writers give us a vision of life as a bumpy succession of disappointments heightened by an occasional intense grief. But whereas carver's strength is in his fraternity with his losers, Shepard comes across as "judgmental", willing to exploit his characters for a fashionable well-turned scenario. Hey, maybe he really is just too good-looking to empathize with his own people.

Innovative, refreshing, fast moving, and brilliant
Sam Shepard, a world-renowned playwright, is also an excellent short story author. His collection, Great Dream of Heaven, is innovative, refreshing, fast moving, and brilliant. I found myself reading some of the stories out loud to my friends and family.Great Dream of Heaven is a must read.

Excellent Collection of Short Stories Full of Actual Humans on the Brink
"Life is what's happening to you while you're making plans for something else." That one sentence from "Living the Sign", sums up this entire collection of simple stories that really hit the nail on the head. The story itself is a metaphor for the collection: The sentence is posted on a sign in a fast food joint by one of its employees, and the sign prompts one customer to begin a mini journey of discovery to find the one prescient individual among the glassy-eyed help behind the counter.

In "The Remedy Man" we get a simple take on the proverbial Horse Whisperer (though E.V., the title character wouldn't classify himself as such - hence the title - he fixes things). But, is this the story of E.V. fixing a horse, or that of him helping a young boy find his own strength and way under the thumb of his controlling father?

The characters in these stories, whether a man unable to grasp his role as father and husband who takes another partygoer hostage at gun point or so obsessed with horse breeding that he locks himself away from his family annually to study catalogs, are either at moments of absolute clarity or complete detachment from life. And, Shepard's sharp, concise dialog and writing snaps right to the point every time.

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A Guide to my Book Rating System:

1 star = The wood pulp would have been better utilized as toilet paper.
2 stars = Don't bother, clean your bathroom instead.
3 stars = Wasn't a waste of time, but it was time wasted.
4 stars = Good book, but not life altering.
5 stars = This book changed my world in at least some small way.

Sam's way . . .
Fans of playwright Sam Shepard will enjoy this collection of short pieces, many of them not more than monologues or brief sketches of dialogue. Sometimes the blanks are filled in and we get an actual short story, as in the title story, about two elderly men who compete for the attention of a waitress at Denny's. Also, "An Unfair Question," in which an over-inquisitive party guest interested in guns is taken to the basement by her host, who becomes dangerously impatient with her.

Others tend toward a Mamet-like fascination with the way people talk who have little to say and don't listen to each other. In "Living the Sign," a fast-food customer tries unsuccessfuly to strike up a conversation with the young employees about a thoughtful message hung over the chicken wings. A father and his two school-age children, in "Berlin Wall Piece," struggles without much success - or gratitude - to help his son with a homework assignment. Two telephone conversations comprise the extent of "Coalinga 1/2 Way," in which one person attempts vainly to keep the other person from walking out of a relationship. Four voice mail messages comprise another, as a shady character reports to a client on the fate of an injured race horse in "Tinnitus."

Two personal favorites are "The Remedy Man," about a man who breaks a willful horse, as well as the tyrannical hold of a father over his son, and the monologue "The Company's Interest," in which a lone night-shift filling station attendant is confronted by two long haired, tatooed and much overweight customers.

Mostly set in the West, many in California, this collection of stories shows flashes of mercurial creative intelligence sending off sparks of story fragments - characters, situations, dialogue, each elusive and elliptical, verbal fireworks against a night sky, your imagination filled with evocative afterimages. BTW, the cover photo is by Jessica Lange.

Reality stripped to essentials
Shepard has thrown away everything not absolutely necessary to get at the core of what matters.

Each story in this slim volume gets to the center of a facet of life and illuminates it.

Though every tale is stripped to essentials each is true to life.

Perfect reading for a Sunday afternoon.

Highly recommended. ... Read more

Product Description
Here are eight of Pulitzer-prizewinning Sam Shepard's most stunning plays.This brilliant American dramatist creates what The New Yorker dubbed "Shepard Country"--a landscape of the imagination, a unique theatrical experience that captures our culture and consciouness, our fears and fantasies.

FOOL FOR LOVE * ANGEL CITY * GEOGRAPHY OF A HORSE DREAMER * ACTION * COWBOY MOUTH * MELODRAMA PLAY * SEDUCED * SUICIDE IN Bb

With an Introduction by Ross Wetzsteon

“Sam Shepard is phenomenal...the best practicing American playwright.” —The New Republic

“Sam Shepard is the most exciting presence in the movie world and one of the most gifted writers ever to work on the American stage.” —Marsha Norman

“The most ruthlessly experimental and uncompromising of today's young writers.” —John Lahr

“Sam Shepard fills the role of professional playwright as a good ballet dancer or acrobat fulfills his role in performance.That is, he always delivers, he executes feats of dexterity and technical difficulty that an untrained person could not, and makes them seem easy.” —Michael Feingold, The Village Voice

"One of the most original, prolific, and gifted dramatists at work today.” —The New Yorker

“Increasingly recognized as one of the more significant dramatists in the English-speaking world.” —Charles R. Bachman, Modern Drama

... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

best of Shepard Vol. II
This collection contains 8 of Pulitzer-prizewinning Sam Shepard's best plays. Shepard has a way of capturing our imagination with a wild collection of characters in even wilder stories. "Fool For Love", "Angel City", "Geography of a Horse Dreamer", "Action", "Cowboy Mouth", Seduced", "Suicide in B", "Melodrama Play".
Shepard is one of the great American voices in theatre. These are all classics that deserve to be remembered and studied.

These plays range from the surreal to the all too real...
With this collection, Shepard demonstrates his remarkable ability to portray America in the realistic ways most contemporary authors/playwrights/poets are afraid to do.The dialogue is captivating and moving, and the action is fast-paced. Definetely an excellent buy. ... Read more

Product Description
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, actor, ex-cowboy, and musician Sam Shepard now stands revealed as a storyteller of dazzling artistry. Bleak and wildly funny, touching but stringently unsentimental, these stories give readers a most intimate view of the writer who has become synonymous with the recklessness, stoicism, and solitude of American manhood.Amazon.com Review
Cruising Paradise contains 40 short stories by the renownedplaywright and actor Sam Shepard. Exploring themes of solitude and loss,Shepard revisits the innocence of boyhood, traverses the confines ofloneliness, gives accounts of the farcical exclusiveness of show business andoffers an obstinate perspective on death. As in his stage and screen work,Shepard ties these musings to the wilds and open spaces of Mexico and theUnited States, utilizing the allure and tempo of the open road to bring hiswriting and self-actualization full circle. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (9)

Compelling short vignettes
I found this book around the house, no idea who bought it or when, and read it over the last week in bits before falling asleep, or waiting in the car, then finishing the last 100 pages this afternoon.

Sam Shepard tells the kind of stories we all wish we had experienced - acting in movies, serious action, funny exploits, deep emotions.Lots of surprising twists, the narrator often detaches himself from the callow preoccupations of lesser mortals.

The brevity of some of the tales and the lack of continuity are offset by the continuing exposure of novel incidents and thoughts.It reminded me of sitting in front of a TV and flipping through the channels.

It was good enough that I ordered more Shepard writing from Amazon.

A lean muscular book!
Cruising Paradise is a lean muscular book. The writing is sometimes brutal and always powerful. His writing is reminiscent of Hemingwayand Jim Harrison, but with a Southwestern flair and a stronger sense of immediacy.It is not the plots orso much the characters in the story that drive the book, but the sense of movement and restlessness in the stories peppered with stoicism that make his stories so interesting. His stories seem to be autobiographical, even those he clearly passes off as fiction. Recommended stories in the book are Nuevo Mundo, A Small Company of Friends, and Cruising Paradise.If you are sick of reading books that seemed contrived or cliche' give this one a look.

Experience art
Through Cruising Paradise the voice of Sam Shepard kept me company during a week or two. I read his fragmented stories before falling asleep and felt at ease. I think it's the way he uses the language; lucid, clear, to thepoint, intense. The language flows and takes you to the images of endlessroads, wide open spaces and the people who live there or just drive throughit . You can feel the heat, you can hear the conversations,while all thetime, in the back of your head Shepards voice leads you. He doesn'tdescribe the situations in very much detail, he just lets the people talk,or think and that's enough. Wonderful experience. I believe it is the artof leaving out, to show what's there, in language and in imagery. Hope tofind this again.

Brilliant
While reading this book, I had to stop more than a few times either to catch my breath or close my eyes and let what I just read sink in.I grew up down on the Mexican border, and Shepard's descriptions of events in thatpart of the world rang true, and were written in a terse manner, as isappropriate for the setting and characters.Brilliant.

Shepard: A Potential Nobel Prize Winner?
What can I say! This is simply the best book I've ever read! Shepard'sshort stories strike you right in the hart in a way other authors only candream about. Who can for example ever forget about the boy with his drunkenfather in the desert, or the actor who travels by car from L.A. down to thedjungles of Mexico? No other author I have read have so completlyspellbound me before, and I have readall of the so called great authors.One can only hope that the Nobel foundation discovers the greatness inShepard. ... Read more

Product Description
Comedy / 3m, 1f / Int. Recently revived at New York's Circle in the Square, where Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly alternated playing the roles of the brothers, this American classic explores alternatives that might spring from the demented terrain of the California landscape. Sons of a desert dwelling alcoholic and a suburban wanderer clash over a film script. Austin, the achiever, is working on a script he has sold to producer Sal Kimmer when Lee, a demented petty thief, drops in. He pitches his own idea for a movie to Kimmer, who then wants Austin to junk his bleak, modern love story and write Lee's trashy Western tale. "Shepard's masterwork.... It tells us a truth, as glimpsed by a 37 year old genius."- New York Post"It's clear, funny, naturalistic. It's also opaque, terrifying, surrealistic. If that sounds contradictory, you're on to one aspect of Shepard's winning genius; the ability to make you think you're watching one thing while at the same time he's presenting another." - San Francisco Chronicle ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

true west the play
this play came in good condition. the only problem was shipping. it took about a month to receive the play when i paid like 5 dollars for shipping. i'm not exactly sure how mail works, but nothing should take that long for that price.

"...when something's been said a thousand times before..."
I didn't like TRUE WEST.But there's nothing wrong with it that could be blamed on this particular production of the play.The actors are good considering the flimsy material that they have to work with.The music is used sparingly, but is very effective at setting the scene.I just couldn't get over the shallow development of the characters and a script that was constantly attempting to be deeper than it was.

The story has one location.Two brothers sit in their mother's house, yelling and screaming at each other until the parental unit herself appears near the end of the play.I like the idea behind the story, which is to put two people in a confined area and see what happens to them.Unfortunately, most of what we learn about these two is quite dull.One brother is a moderately successful screenwriter while the other makes his living as a petty burglar.I had hoped that we wouldn't get soppy scenes of each brother revealing that he secretly envied the other's lifestyle, but that's exactly what we get here.The successful brother is the one without good people skills and the streetwise brother really wants to make it big, but doesn't have the proper school learning to do so.You've probably seen this sort of thing played out in films, television and theatre thousands of times before; I know I have.The problem here is that there is virtually nothing else going on in the script to distract from the banality of the characters.

The humor comes across as being forced -- very forced -- especially in the second half.The play is billed as a tragicomedy, but the transition from the funny scenes to the dramatic is shockingly jarring.You can almost hear the goofy, "Hey, this is funny!" music in the background every time a supposedly lighthearted moment comes up.It's possibly attempting to be a black comedy, but I just can't really see it that way.People who moan and whine and complain constantly could very well be hilarious, but I just wasn't amused by them.The comedy didn't flow naturally from the drama, and the drama just hung limply by itself out in No Man's Land.

If you already know that you like the play, then you will probably enjoy this particular staging of it.The various sound effects and music are used in moderation, and are very efficient at placing the audience right inside that house.The script does have one or two nice lines about the falseness of the Hollywood lifestyle and the boundary between the life that we see in pop culture compared to the reality that we drive through every day.They aren't the most original observations that you'll ever hear, but the wording of them and the acting of the principals really make those short sequences work.It's a pity that the rest of the script wasn't as sharp as these moments, because they really had me longing to hear more.

At one point near the end, the hardened brother (who is attempting to write a screenplay, just like his sibling) asks, "What do you call it when something's been said a thousand times before?" The answer that he receives is, of course, "a cliché".And unfortunately that sums up almost this entire production.Other dramas that have utilized these rather basic elements haven't made the mistake of not including anything else.But TRUE WEST is just one big cliché.

Great Play
in True West , Sam Shepard's method is a kind of allegorical realism, where the use of everyday items such as golf clubs, houseplants and toasters is not at all intended to suggest us reality.
In this play, Shepard illustrates the duality of human personality, and our primitive instincts for violence against the unavoidable family ties that usually discourage an individual from acting as wanted. In this case, two brothers, Austin and Lee, who experience the typical good boy vs. bad boy sibling rivalry unexpectedly meet. As a result a series of emotional angry outbreaks take place as Austin can't defined himself: Is he frightened of Lee or does he admire his brother's willingness to break the rules? Austin graduated college, got married, has a family to whom he will return soon. He is disciplined, striving and ambitious. Quite the opposite, Lee is uneducated, violent, envious and resentful.
Austin, a Hollywood screenwriter, is housesitting his mother's home while she is on a sightseeing trip to Alaska. His brother, Lee, has appeared all of a sudden and wants to share the house. Lee is a tramp and small-time criminal, who has just spent the previous six months in the Mojave Desert with their alcoholic father.
The filthy and foul Lee invites Austin's Hollywood producer for a round of golf, and ends up selling him on a story idea for a modern Western film, totally displacing his hard-working brother, who as a result crumples into a chaotic and violent wreck.
Shepard's focus is not on verisimilitude, but on the intensity of the conflict that is revealed. For instance, the main action in the play is the reduction of the mother's neat household into a garbage dump. This includes the destruction of Austin's typewriter with a golf club, vomiting into the desiccated remains of a philodendron and squashing fresh toast into the linoleum. Additionally, Lee had stolen several toasters from the neighborhood, "There's gonna be a general lack of toast in the neighborhood this morning..." he says.
In various occasions, Austin seemed to be afraid of his brother as he winds up doing what Lee asks him, such as lending him his car or typing the script of his imaginary screenplay. However, what Austin mostly seems to fear is not Lee, but his own deep-set, self-destructive impulses as he lives out the paranoiac nightmare of being displaced by his brother. "You think you are the only one in the brain department?" Lee questions him.
When Lee is dictating Austin the lines of his screenplay, he narrates the story of two characters that are running after each other -- actually referring to themselves. He says: "The one who is chasing, doesn't know where the other one is taking him, the one who is being chased, doesn't know where he is going." The two brothers are constantly competing with each other; even though, they head in opposite directions in life. Austin has a career and a family while Lee doesn't but he has the ability to break the rules, his brother strictly follows.
Towards the end of the play, both brothers who are very intoxicated from having being drinking alcohol the night through, start to act both wild and silly at the same time. Under the influence of alcohol, repressions and taboos are forgotten and one acts and says things that would not normally do. As in Fool for Love, the protagonists confess their deepest fears and feelings when drunk, in True West, Austin reveals how he feels lost and lonely despite of his accomplishments, he says:" there's nothing real down here... streets look like a postcard..." He is living his dreams (he is becoming a playwright, has a wife, etc) but he seems not to get acquainted with his reality and does not know anymore what is real and what is not.
Then, decides to "try" the toasters and make some toasts, which Lee steps over and smashes on the floor as he criticizes him: "you're making that toast like salvation or something...I don't want any toast..." to what Austin replies: "...I love the smell of toast...it's salvation...". While this argument goes on, their mother comes back doesn't surprising much when finding out the disaster her sons had made to her house. But, she tells them they'll both end up in the same dessert.
At the end of the play the phrases: "...Something to keep me in touch" and "It's easy to go out of touch" made me realize that one must hold onto something that will keep one focused in order to go on -- either focus on one's reality or on one's dream(s). Everyone needs that toast of salvation!

my review
this play is great, buy it! ... Read more

Product Description
These three plays by Pulitzer Prize winner 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. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Buena compra
El libro llegó a Madrid en perfecto estado, antes incluso de lo esperado. Confiable, 100% recomendado. ... Read more

Product Description
A newly revised edition of an American classic, Sam Shepard’s Pulitzer Prize—winning Buried Child is as fierce and unforgettable as it was when it was first produced more than twenty-five years ago.

A scene of madness greets Vince and his girlfriend as they arrive at the squalid farmhouse of Vince’s hard-drinking grandparents, who seem to have no idea who he is. Nor does his father, Tilden, a hulking former All-American footballer, or his uncle, who has lost one of his legs to a chain saw. Only the memory of an unwanted child, buried in an undisclosed location, can hope to deliver this family ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

A
With enough symbolism to keep a literary student happily busy for weeks, Sam Shepard's Pulitzer Prize-winning play throws you into a surreal world grounded in the decay of the American Dream. The family centered in the drama is dysfunctional, to put it mildly, and is a microcosm of the hopes and eventual destruction of those hopes in America. The action plays out like a combination between American Gothic and Frida Kahlo - based in reality, but little bits here and there remind the audience that they are not in a world structured realistically. Shepard has stunning skills in the way he paints pictures with words. The only gripe is that the motivations of Halie, the matriarch of the family, are never fully developed or explained. Perhaps Shepard's intention was to keep emotions and feelings as buried as the title implies.

Wacky, bizarre and very entertaining!
It's clear to see why Buried Child won the 78-79 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.The play borders on theatre of the absurd with it's illogical circumstances, and bizarre plot.We learn soon that a baby was buried, but we are entertained as the story processes and unfolds through the eyes of this dysfunctional family. The conflict is between the need to reveal the truth, and refusal to speak about the truth.A visitor to the home causes the revealing of the truth.


Dodge is a sickly 70ish year old drinker, smoker and frequently has violent coughing outbursts.Married to Halie, 65 year old, they have 3 boys. Halie spends time (tipsy time) with the church Father.

Tilden, the oldest, shows up after 20 years, spent time in jail and got run out of New Mexico. Tilden was an All-American quarterback or fullback, the family can't remember which. Now he is mixed up in the head and can't take care of himself.

Bradley, they determine isn't very bright; he chopped his leg with a chainsaw.Bradley has serious conflict with Dodge.

And Ansel, the soldier who died in a motel, on his honeymoon with the Catholic Italian girl, the mob.Haley swears he was doomed when he married her.Ansel played basketball and could have made money, could have taken care of Dodge and Halie.

Father Dewis just tries to mediate.For Halie, he would erect a statue of Ansel with a rifle in one hand and a basketball in the other.

Vince, the grandson, Tilden's son arrives after6 years and nobody recognizes him.He is symbolic of the buried unwanted child.

Shelly, Vince's girlfriend is thrust into this bizarre scenario, and it is she who becomes the focus of the unveiling truth of the child.

The most prominent symbolism in Buried Child is the rain, and how the vegetables in the field have grown.The rain is mentioned a lot, and it serves to be the nuturing of the vegetables, like nuturing the family for the truth.

This play is brilliant, engaging, and very entertaining.The dialogue is real, paces well and there are a few lengthy monologues.Like good literature, it requires a second reading.Don't skip that.......Rizzo

A two-fold level in Buried Child
There might be some people who tend to think of Buried Child as an elusive play, for there are a lot of actions they don't quite understand. Nevertheless, I think something is weird because Shepard's focus is not simply on the realistic level, but on the symbolic level as well. The backyard in this play, for one, is conveying this two-fold level. On the one hand, it is physically a backyard as many people have in real life. It is, on the other, a mysterious place inasmuch as there is no detailed description of the place, yet a few significant events all so happen to take place at the backyard. That is, growing crops and burying the child is all relating to the backyard. In my opinion, there are many other actions and events that have such a two-fold meaning in this play.

Real and Unreal
Buried Child is a story of coming home and coming to terms with the past. Sheppard's use of visual imagery and his mastery of simple, stark, but powerful dialog make this one of the better modern American plays. 5 men, 2women, one set.

Daring American Theater by an underrated playwright
A courageous work that deserved the Pulitzer. It's American Theater of the Absurd at its best.

The familes dysfunction is depicted in a disturbing climax.The title depicts the family's metaphorical "skeletons in the closet"in a quite literal way.

Be prepared, this is not your usual drama.If you enjoy the absurd, you've come to the right place. ... Read more

Product Description
This comprehensive analysis traces Sam Shepard's career from his experimental one-act plays of the 1960s through the 1994 play Simpatico. Concentrating on his playwriting, this book charts Shepard's various developments and shifts of direction, and the changing contexts in which his work has appeared. Engaging, informative, and insightful, The Theatre of Sam Shepard is the definitive source on the works of this innovative and original writer. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Nice Insight
Working on a production of Fool For Love, I came across this book for background research.Well worth a look.

the best guide to Shepard's theater in print
Bottoms' study is an insightful and surefooted introduction to one of America's most troubling and innovative playwrights. While the book presents itself as a fairly straightforward work of dramatic criticism, with some production history and biography mixed in, it is written in an enliveningly lucid style and is brimming with surprising insights. Its organization is pleasingly straightforward too: the introduction lays out the main 'crises' that run through Shepard's work, and then the book proceeds to use these crises as it goes chronologically through the evolution of Shepard's career, paying attention to its many aesthetic twists and turns. Highly recommended for anyone studying Shepard, or interested in putting on a thoughtful production of one of his plays! ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (2)

Blood & Sex
Seven drunk nurses are attacked by seven twelve year olds on customized Schwinns. A young man covers a nude female corpse with hundred dollar bills and plays Rolling Stones songs to her just before he burns her in the bathtub. A bored guitarist reaches orgasm with his Gibson. A traveler is tormented by a dead raven's feather. These and other stories and poetry make up playwright Sam Shepard's first foray into fiction and poetry (originally published in 1973). His major themes here include blood and violence, sex, love, and America. For any Shepard fan, this is a must-read. Shepard's images of America--the dry, flat desert, the endless highway, the seedy motel--are so dead-on that we are right there with his characters, looking over their shoulders as they commit sins and/or try to find some good in this world. Read it with Shepard's CRUISING PARADISE and MOTEL CHRONICLES.

Genius
Sam Shepard is one of the unheralded geniuses in American literature. This book, his first foray as far as I know into a 'scrap book' style offiction, is beautiful, delicate, powerful, intimitely connected to thenatural world and perhaps the world of spirits, as well as a pre-cursor tohis future prose, poems and plays.If you wish to experience an Americathat has for the most part vanished for forever, an America that is rarelytalked about in truth on our cable, radio, and internet, then pick upeither this book, Motel Chronicles, or Cruising Paradise.All three areunique companion pieces, spread some twenty five years apart inpublication, and well worth owning. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (2)

Fast, Cheap, and Out of Breath
This is a book which can be read rather quickly simply because there isn't much there.As a biography, it presents very little information that cannot be found in magazine articles and interviews. Nor is its analysis of Shepard's plays very helpful. One hopes that a literary biography will cast new light both on an individual's work via an investigation of his/her life and on an individual's life via an exploration of his/her work. This book, unfortunately, comes up short on both counts.

Notable effort, but not enough
If you are looking for an inside view of the mind and man of Sam Shepard, this book really is not for you.Granted the author had a daunting task, revealing the life of perhaps one of the most private men around.Thething is, I bought the book to find out about Sam Shepard.Instead, I geta glancing blow of his life and work.Certain facts and sentences arerepeated four of five times, as if the editor had fallen asleep at thewheel on this one.Shewey tells us that Shepard's life influenced hiswork, he tells us that his past influences his present, that Shepard's lifehas a direct influence on what he puts on paper.That is the thing... heTELLS us,he doesn't SHOW us. If you are truly looking for an insideview of the great playwright, check out "Hawk Moon" or even"Cruising Paradise".Those books, written by Shepard, will showyou the man, his life, and work.Shewey's book makes you read points overand over and leaves you looking for hidden pages at the end of the book.Iliterally stared at the last page and asked "Is this it?"Inever like reviewing an author's work, because I feel as though I reallydon't have the right- yet as a reader, I left this book feeling extremelyunsatisfied. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

POWERFUL DRAMA BY AMERICAN LEGENDARY PLAYWRIGHT
Sam Shepard's "Fool for Love"is the story of high school lovers who become involved in a tempestuous, passionate relationship. We find them some fifteen years later, with May having moved across the country and 'Eddie having followed her.A visitor comes to take May to the movies and is the catalyst for the revelation of the secret of Eddie & May's relationship. The "Old Man" remains in a small space apart from the basic playing area and exists only in May's & Eddie's memories.
Sam Shepard has been a leading American playwright for over 30 years. This is one of his few plays, if not the only one, in which a woman is the leading character. It is a powerful drama with several twists & turns in the plot lealding to a shocking revelation of their relationshisp.

Great value
This script was needed by my son in a hurry, and I got it super fast.He was very happy with it, and I was very happy with the price and speed of shipping.Fantastic play, by the say.

Illusion and Reality
In Fool for Love , Sam Shepard analyzes the complicated relationship between May and Eddie who are involved in a love-hate, fascination-repulsion 15-year-long relation which is once more in the `on again' phase.
Set in a low-budget motel room on the edge of the Mojave Desert, May and Eddie play out an unpredictable encounter. Traveling close to 2,500 miles to come back into her life, Eddie attempts to once again declare his faithfulness and commitment to the unconvinced May, who tells him: "You gotta give this up. You've been jerking me off like this for fifteen years. Fifteen years, I've been a yo-yo for you". May screams for Eddie to leave yet pleads for him to stay upon his repeated exits. Through their arguing, the chemistry and history the two have shared becomes apparent and it is obvious that the characters are deeply in love. "We've got a pact...we've made a pact", Eddie said to May. "You know we're connected, May. We will always be connected...that was decided a long time ago", he added.
A bottle of tequila blends the couple's arguing into the narration of a story that deepens on May and Eddie's past revealing how the two were already completely in love when the truth was learned about their true relationship. At this point of the play, Shepard had gotten illusion and reality finely combined that it takes a while to understand that the Old Man observing, and occasionally interacting with the characters, is just their distant father's ghost.
Shepard has done an amazing job in this play managing illusory conversations naturally flow within the real ones. May and Eddie seem to have both independent and joined conversations with the Old Man.
A fourth character, Martin comes into the story, as the shy, naive date of May to reminds us that the conversation between the protagonists is "real". As Eddie, now drunk, continues his story of how he came to know May, the old man yells for him to stop the story, but ends up discovering facts of his own past as well -- which confused me since his presence is not real but illusory only.
The fact that at the end of the play, the motel gets burned down by Eddie's mistress, -- as May refers to her -- May is forced to move away again, suggesting us that the vicious cycle in which the characters live, will be repeated once again following what Eddie once told May: "You'll never get rid of me. I'll track you down no matter where you go".

Fool For Love
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting to get different results.We learn of Eddie, Mae, their father, and a "Man" (Martin) coming for a date blind to the status of therelationship of his date and her brother and their father.I am a Seniorat Lindenwood University in St. Charles Missouri, double majoring inTheatre and Mass Communications.This April, I will be directing"Fool For Love" as my senior project.This play, as analyzed ina previous modern drama class and in my current working analysis, is highlyidentifiable with anyone who has ever been involved in a severelydysfunctional relationship that won't go away. Mr. Shepard createsfourintricate and powerful characters sharing both realistic and etherealexistances. ... Read more

Product Description
The standard critical work on the author features two dozen essays and miscellaneous pieces by leading theatre critics, directors, and actors on the plays and productions of Shepard, from the beginning of his career. A special section by the author on his own work is also included. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Essential reading for any student of Shepard's work
This is a rather eclectic anthology thatincludes critical analyses of Shepard's plays (written between 1963 and 1981) as well as first-hand accounts by some of the actors and directors who collaborated with Shepardon various productions.Taken as a whole, the critical essays address mostof the plays Shepard wrote during those seventeen years. They do, however,vary wildly in quality.Editor Bonnie Marranca's opening essay, whileoften quite perceptive, occasionally falls prey tosimplisticgeneralization. Jack Gelber's essay, The Playwright as Shaman,is marredby interpretive inaccuracies. The best of the bunch are Robert Coe's"Image Shots are Blown" : The Rock Playswhich presents anilluminating analysis of The Tooth of Crime, Florence Falk's Men withoutWomen:The Shepard Landscape whichreveals how certain male and femalecharacter-types appear and reappear (in slightly different dress) in a fairnumber of Shepard's plays, and William Kleb's Worse Than Homeless, abeautifully written examination of True West from a Langian perspective. Also of note, are Shepard's own critical writings which define, albeitobliquely, his aesthetic and creative methods.Finally, it need be statedthat despite its uneveness (which, after all, is endemic to anthologies), this book is essential reading for anyone interested in Shepard's work. Itis certainly one of the most comprehensive examinations ofthis playwrightand his plays presently in print. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (9)

Shepard Gets Better With Age
I purchased this book because I had just finished Shepard's more recent "Day out of Days."What I found most interesting is how Shepard has aged so damn well as a writer."Motel Chronicles" was a great read yet is really just an excellent rough draft compared to his more recent work."Motel Chronicles" starts to shape Shepard's great feel of the modern day lonesome dessert highway.What does stick out in this book is Shepard's humor.Muhammad Ali was once asked why he was always being so funny.He explained that he never tried to be funny.He just told the truth.Shepard does the same.In between tasting the dessert and feeling Shepard's despondent characters in freeze-fame so well, I found myself laughing out loud.Shepard makes no attempt at well-crafted jokes.He just tells the truth.And sometimes its damn funny.It's a quick and worthwhile read.

Chris Bowen
Author of Our Kids: Building Relationships in the Classroom

Luke warm on this one
I never finished this book. Perhaps my expectations were too high as I like Shepard. Perhaps I'll give it another go later. Maybe not.

Not a major work but it fascinates
MOTEL CHRONICLES was recommended on a website devoted to journal writing.It is non-sequential and many of the entries have the shape of honed work but all the same it is a good example of a writer's sketchbook, one used for practice and inspiration.More importantly, it is a window on Shepard's frame of mind in the years immediately following the Pulitzer Prize for BURIED CHILD.The seeds of later works can be found in this book.

The entries swim back and forth from 1978 -1982, mapping the writer's peripatetic movement around the country, mostly in California and the west.It captures bits of his early identities, military childhood on the move, waiter, cowboy, actor, writer, friend, lover, husband, father.It is framed by portraits of being a child, the first entry is one of his earliest childhood memories in his mother's arms; the last is the adult caring for a mother felled by a brain aneurysm.This is no confessional or revealing autobiographical piece, however, just a writer at work pulling out inspiration from experience.Shepard is highly articulate, his portrayal of the contemporary west is priceless, and his poetry is not bad at all.The writing has an honest, non-star-turn quality to it.

Excellent
One of my favorite collections of playwright-actor Sam Shepard (the others being CRUISING PARADISE and HAWK MOON). This is a collection of short stories, poetry, rants, observations, etc., from Shepard's own life. Each section is separated by date and city (though NOT in any particular order, as sections skip from the '70s to the '80s and back again to the '70s); my favorite is "9/24/80, San Francisco, Ca." (in my edition, pp. 43-46), a short story detailing a boy's train ride to his grandparents' home in Chicago, during which he meet a beautiful barefoot girl who looks like Tuesday Weld.

Some of the other stories in this collection formed the basis of Wim Wenders' 1984 film PARIS, TEXAS, which Shepard wrote, and which happens to be one of my all-time favorite films. MOTEL CHRONICLES would be a wonderful introduction to Sam Shepard; I highly recommend it to anyone who has ever wondered about the desert, the road, and America (the beautiful & the ugly).

Very moving
I knew of Sam Shepard from seeing him act in movies, and was aware of his plays.Deciding to read some of his work, I picked up Motel Chronicles and found it deeply moving.His writing is very calming and free...just straight-forward without artifice.This collection of poems, short stories, observations and vignettes was published in 1982 and reminds of simpler times and places--but with hard-edged realities (as Shepard offers reminiscences of his childhood as well as his adult travels and experiences). Read this for its serenity and down to earth prose. ... Read more

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Product Description
Few American playwrights have exerted as much influence on the contemporary stage as Sam Shepard. His plays are performed "on" and "off" Broadway as well as in all the major regional American theaters. They are also widely performed and studied in Europe, particularly in Britain, Germany and France, findingboth a popular and a scholarly audience. This companion explores the various aspects of Shepard's career, providing fascinating first-hand accounts and substantial critical chapters on the plays, poetry, music, fiction, acting, directing and film work. ... Read more

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Currently a critical and box office sensation, Sam Shepard's newest play is amasterpiece of poetic and theatrical brilliance that looks unerringly at loveand family in the American West. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

"A Lie of the Mind"
I bought this for my daughter who read it and is using an excerpt from it for her musical theater auditions.It's a great play.

His Most Popular Play Among Playwrights
In almost every playwriting class I have taken the teacher has asked the participants to go around the room and discuss their favorite plays. A Lie of the Mind is always everyone's favorite Shepard play. I have curiously never heard playwrights mention Fool for Love, Buried Child, or Curse of the Starving Class which are much more popular with actors and directors (and the Pulitzer Committee). True West is sometimes a favorite for its tight X-shaped structure. But, A Lie of the Mind has a gorgeous ensemble feel, interwining the lives of two troubled families into an alcoholic and violent aria of tortured love. I have seen it performed twice and seen actors work on each individual scene as class work so it haunts me a lot and never fails to astonish. The play has a heartbeat and sweet warm flesh. It also has one of the most dramatic and involving beginning scenes ever penned. A must read for playwrights interested in writing ensemble pieces.

Not up to par....
As a theatre major and a huge fan of Sam Shepard's body of works, I was excited to read "Lie...." The play has gained popularity recently, especially in academic theatre circles.The characters, however rich, never seem to truely develop.The plot is stalled from the first scene -- the whole piece seems to be nothing but one loud, emotional outburst after another.If you want to be exposed to the greatness of Shepard, stick with "Buried Child" or "Fool for Love" -- even "Curse of the Starving Class" shines far above this work.

An accurate portrayal of imperfect human nature.
This wonderful drama is a great example of the imperfect quality of human nature.Even the characters that seem to be the most put together have their own weaknesses and foibles.Shepard has done a very good job of constructing the scenes in a logical manner, appropriately switchingbetween the homes of two different, yet strongly connected families.Oneof the crowning achievements of this drama is that it draws you in andmakes you feel for the characters of the two midwestern families,especially Beth, the now-mentally damaged wife of Jake.I have not seenthis play performed but if the written play can draw you the reader in sodeeply, I can only imagine what the performed piece can do to the audience. I highly reccomend this drama to anyone who loves to read well-writtenplays. ... Read more

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In the autumn of 1975, ew England is festering with Bicentennial madness," Bob Dylan and his Rolling Thunder Revue-a rag-tag variety show that Dylan envisioned as a traveling gypsy circus-toured twenty-two cities across the Northeast. Swept up in the motley crew, which included Joni Mitchell, Mick Ronson, Allen Ginsberg, Arlo Guthrie, Joan Baez, and Ramblin' Jack Elliot, was playwright Sam Shepard, ostensibly hired to write, on the spot, the script for a Fellini-esque, surreal movie that would come out of the tour. The script never materialized, but throughout the many moods and moments of his travels with Dylan and his troupe, Shepard kept an impressionistic Rolling Thunder Logbook of life on the road. Illuminated by forty candid photographs by official tour photographer Ken Regan, Shepard's mental-snap shots capture the camaraderie, isolation, head games, and pill-popping mayhem of the tour, providing a window into Dylan's singular talent, enigmatic charisma, and vision of America. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Shepard Pitch-Perfect with Sense of Time and Place
I consider myself a pretty big Dylan fan.So much of the music is always playing on continual loops, rattling around inside me.And though I'm a big fan of the music, I've never been big on the books.I just don't need to know times and dates and historical record.My die-hard geek devotion to Dylan has never been statistical.It's always about song, the man's own words, and great anecdotes.But, when I stumbled on a book about my favorite Dylan period written by Shepard, I bought it right away.

And, it's dead-on.Shepard is right there.At all times.What's most impressive is how Shepard never compromises his own prose style ( it's all Shepard in tone and word choice ) and yet is somehow able to fade to the background and just lets the perfect moments rise to the top.Two particular moments blew me away.Shepard does a fantastic job of pulling you into Ginsberg reading a poem about motherhood to hotel guests, most of which are Jewish moms of another generation.I can feel them twitch and pause as Ginsberg pours his soul out over them.Shepard gives you a whole extra layer, making the great connection between Ginsberg, religion, and audience, tapping into more than most would have the skill or eye to do.The Shepard eye also does a phenomenal job of letting you just sort of sit with the Dylan mystique.I particularly like how Shepard discusses Dylan's great use of silence in conversations.It's a great, fast-paced read that harnesses the manic feel of a time and an idea.It's awesome.

Chris Bowen
Author of Our Kids: Building Relationships in the Classroom

True East
I gave this four stars because I don't think Sam would want it to get five. That would make it too perfect, and once you read Jack Kerouac's On the Road, you're always wary of making things too perfect. That also seemed to be the idea of the Rolling Thunder Revue: to let things fall together even though that means they may fall apart (and by Sam's reckoning they eventually did).

Coupled with J. D. Salinger stream of consciousness writing, Sam dragged Kerouac's real time typing into the deconstructed stage with all four walls down. I only know Sam from his portrayl of Chuck Yeager in the Right Stuff from the book by Tom Wolfe-- the book full of Wolfian gimmicks but the film made the old fashioned way, his plays like True West, and the fact that his mom once toasted my fledgeling writing career-- I hope one day to make her proud.

Sam was hired to make a film of the Revue tour, and wound up making a book. While that means it has pages, photos, and a cover, within that loose definition, it falls apart as much as it can. Sam uses the "f" word, but as a word, not for effect (it is a word). There are bits of writing like this: "Fans are more dangerous than a man with a weapon because they're after something invisible."

The thing that galvanized the tour was fighting to get Rubin Carter released (which eventually happened), and Dylan penned the amazing "Hurricane", an absolutely riveting song when you hear it on the Bootleg Vols 1-3 CD set (or various other ways it exists), not only for the lyrics and music, but Dylan's delivery, at once cool and impassioned, the crazy quilt of images, skewed syntax, sprung rhythms, and well, Sam Shepardness of the whole thing.

But was it all a museum set piece? More safely enshrined rock history? Or can it happen now? Will someone rise up today for Eric Volz? Let the thunder roll on. ... Read more

Product Description
The complete scripts to six Sam Shepard plays: The Unseen Hand ¥ Forensic and the Navigators ¥ The Holy Ghostly ¥ Back Bog Beast Bait ¥ Shaved Splits ¥ 4-H Club. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

No trae el papel protector
Caro y además el libro vino un poco manchado y manoseado, sin la portada y contraportada con la imagen en la foto. Directamente el libro negro.

SAM'S EARLY PLAYS ARE AMAZING
WOW! This book is absolutely electrifying.I was first turned on to Sam Shepard from reading "True West", one of his later amazing plays.As I read more and more I thought I had a good understanding of hiswriting:until I read this book.This book contains many of Shepard'searlier plays from the time he first landed in New York and, as hisroommate Charles Mingus Jr. has said "Would go into a room with a reamof paper and come out two hours later with a finished play".If youhave really enjoyed some of Shepard's later stuff, I definetly recommendthis book to give you a fresh perspective on someone who literally turns"conventional theatre" upside down.If you are new to Shepard,you might want to tryhis later works first, only because they are easier tofollow.These earlier works are very much like the "Beatgeneration"- throwing out speeches and sentences without punctuation,with tons of craziness happening on every inch of the stage.Sometimes theplays may be hard to follow, or confusing, but if you really"get" what Shepard is doing, you will love this book.Just bewarned that all the plays are far from conventional theatre.If you are an"Our Town" type of person this isn't for you.If you enjoy Albeeand Beckett, if you enjoy equal parts peace and chaos on stage, then checkthis book out. ... Read more