Sam Shepard

Austin, working on his Hollywood screenplay, is disturbed by the arrival of his estranged brother, Lee, just returned from three months in the desert. During a brief spell of uneasy cohabitation in their absent mother's house, Lee employs himself as a door-to-door burglar before killing his brother's film idea by pitching his own to Austin's producer. But Lee is no writer and the brothers must strike a deal, escalating sibling rivalry to fever pitch in the blazing Californian heat. Sam Shephard's True West was first performed at the Magic Theatre, San Francisco, in 1980 and has since become recognised as an American classic.

The final work from the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, actor, and musician, drawn from his transformative last days In searing, beautiful prose, Sam Shepard's extraordinary narrative leaps off the page with its immediacy and power. It tells in a brilliant braid of voices the story of an unnamed narrator who traces, before our rapt eyes, his memories of work, adventure, and travel as he undergoes medical tests and treatments for a condition that is rendering him more and more dependent on the loved ones who are caring for him. The narrator's memories and preoccupations often echo those of our current moment--for here are stories of immigration and community, inclusion and exclusion, suspicion and trust. But at the book's core, and his, is family--his relationships with those he loved, and with the natural world around him. Vivid, haunting, and deeply moving, Spy of the First Person takes us from the sculpted gardens of a renowned clinic in Arizona to the blue waters surrounding Alcatraz, from a New Mexico border town to a condemned building on New York City's Avenue C. It is an unflinching expression of the vulnerabilities that make us human--and an unbound celebration of family and life.

people herehave becomethe peoplethey're pretending to be.'Sam Shepard's language is sparse and crystal clear. His words appear modest, but they have huge scope.'Wim WendersThis volume is the first collection of Sam Shepard's autobiographical fiction and poetry.It inspired the award-winning film, Paris, Texas.'Sam Shepard is the greatest U.S. playwright of his generation. Since 1964 he has mapped out a huge mythic territory...like Whitman, his is vast and contains multitudes, his plays soar over the empty tracts of the Midwest, celebrate the space, energy and naive optimism of the new-found lands.' Time Out

This searing, extraordinarily evocative narrative opens with a man in his house at dawn, surrounded by aspens, coyotes cackling in the distance as he quietly navigates the distance between present and past. As memory overtakes him, he sees the bygone America of his childhood: the farmland and the feedlots, the railyards and the diners--and, most hauntingly, his father's young girlfriend, with whom he also became involved, setting into motion a tragedy that has stayed with him. His complex interiority is filtered through views of mountains and deserts as he drives across the country, propelled by Benzedrine, rock and roll, and a restlessness born out of exile. The rhythms of theater, the language of poetry, and a flinty humor combine in this stunning meditation on the nature of experience, at once celebratory, surreal, poignant, and unforgettable.

In A Particle of Dread, Sam Shepard takes one of the most famous plays in history--Oedipus Rex--and transforms it into a modern American classic. In this telling, Oedipus, King of Thebes, prophesized to kill his father and marry his mother, alternates between his classical identity and that of contemporary "Otto." His wife (and true mother), Jocasta, is also called Jocelyn, and his antagonist (and true father) is split into three characters, Laius, Larry, and Langos. Two present-day policemen from the Southwest stand in for the Greek chorus as they investigate the murder case. Dazzlingly inventive, ringing with the timelessness of myth, A Particle of Dread is an unforgettable work that grapples with questions of storytelling and destiny--the narratives that we pass down, and how they shape our lives. It is a play that lingers in the mind long after we finish the last scene.

Sam Shepard was arguably America’s finest working dramatist, as well as an accomplished screenwriter, actor, and director. Winner of a Pulitzer Prize, he wrote more than forty-five plays, including True West, Fool for Love, and Buried Child. Shepard also appeared in more than fifty films, beginning with Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven, and was nominated for an Academy Award for his performance in The Right Stuff. Despite the publicity his work and life attracted, however, Shepard remained a strongly private man who said many times that he would never write a memoir. But he did write intensively about his inner life and creative work to his former father-in-law and housemate, Johnny Dark, who was Shepard’s closest friend, surrogate brother (they were nearly the same age), and even artistic muse.Two Prospectors gathers nearly forty years of correspondence and transcribed conversations between Shepard and Dark. In these gripping, sometimes gut-wrenching letters, the men open themselves to each other with amazing honesty. Shepard’s letters give us the deepest look we will ever get into his personal philosophy and creative process, while in Dark’s letters we discover insights into Shepard’s character that only an intimate friend could provide. The writers also reflect on the books and authors that stimulate their thinking, their relationships with women (including Shepard’s anguished decision to leave his wife and son-Dark’s stepdaughter and grandson-for actress Jessica Lange), personal struggles, and accumulating years. Illustrated with Dark’s candid, revealing photographs of Shepard and their mutual family across many years, as well as facsimiles of numerous letters, Two Prospectors is a compelling portrait of a complex friendship that anchored both lives for decades, a friendship also poignantly captured in Treva Wurmfeld’s film, Shepard & Dark.

When Roscoe, a 65-year-old Cervantes scholar, runs off with a young woman named Sally, he decides to stay a while in her family home. Soon he discovers that Sally's house--once inhabited by James Dean; perched precariously over the San Fernando valley--is filled with secrets, sadness, and haunted women who cannot leave themselves or anyone else in peace. From Lucy, Sally's suspicious sister, to Mable, their Shakespeare-quoting invalid mother, to Elizabeth, Mable's lovely and mysteriously mute nurse, the forces of the house conspire to make Roscoe question his assumptions about everything. As scars and histories are revealed, Shepard shows, as only he can, what happens when the secrets simmering within a family boil over. Heartless masterfully explores the irrevocability of our pasts--and the possibility of life begun anew.

Filled with wry, dark humor, unparalleled imagination, unforgettable characters, and exquisitely crafted storytelling, Sam Shepard's plays have earned him enormous acclaim over the past five decades. In these fifteen one-acts, we see him at his best, displaying his trademark ability to portray human relationships, love, and lust with rare authenticity. These fifteen furiously energetic plays confirm Shepard's status as our most audacious living playwright, unafraid to set genres and archetypes spinning with results that are utterly mesmerizing. Included in this volume: Ages of the MoonEvanescence; Shakespeare in the AlleyShort Life of TroubleThe Unseen HandThe Rock GardenChicagoIcarus's Mother4H ClubFourteen Hundred ThousandRed CrossCowboys #2Forensic & The NavigatorsThe Holy GhostlyBack Bog Beast BaitKiller's Head

In these seventeen stories, Sam Shepard taps the same wellspring that has made him one of America's most acclaimed playwrights: sex and regret; the yearning for a frontier that has been subdivided out of existence; the anxious gulf that separates men and women; 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 woman driving her mother's ashes back east for burial has an oracular run-in with an injured hawk. 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. Filled with cruelty, sorrow and flinty humour, Great Dream of Heaven is Shepard at his best, exercising his gifts for diamond-sharp physical description and effortless dialogue in stories that recall the themes he has explored with such ferocity and lyricism in his work for the theatre.

His first major book of fiction: lyrical, personal, mythical, hilarious and mesmeric stories that shed new light on both the US and the writer through whose eyes we access this compelling and resonant land.

From one of our most acclaimed writers: a collection of tales set mainly in 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. A wandering actor returns to his hometown and runs into an old friend, who recounts their teenage days of stealing cars, buying Benzedrine, and sleeping with whores in Tijuana. A Minnesota couple and their children, traveling south for vacation, are so caught up in the ordinary dramas of family life that they remain oblivious to the beauty of the Yucatan peninsula. Stunning, inventive, and powerful, these stories are Shepard at his flinty-eyed, unwavering best.

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 pitch

A solitary man digs a hole in the ground, near a dead horse. Amidst 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 "Great 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. With Shepard's linguistic flair, subtle humor, and probing insights, Kicking a Dead Horse is an invigorating addition to the works of one of America's most innovative playwrights.

One of the plays that first announced Sam Shepard as an original voice in American theater, Tooth of Crime is his thrillingly innovative rock drama, published here in a revised edition that is as fresh and provocative as the original was more than thirty years ago. An aging rock star in a world in which entertainment and street warfare go hand in hand, Hoss must defend himself against Crow, a newcomer who battles him for fame. Combining musical styles and intense dialogue in an unconventional musical-fantasy, Tooth of Crime riffs brilliantly on rising stars and fading legends, and rock lived and died for.

Family intrigue in major new work from America's finest playwright In Bernalillo New Mexico, Ray and Earl return home to mark the passing of their estranged father, Henry. Over a bottle of bourbon and a box of old photographs, tales of their childhoods emerge. As they encounter Henry's bizarre collection of friends, including his wild voracious lover, the colourful circumstances surrounding his death provoke violent suspicion.The Late Henry Moss received its European premiere on 12 January 2006 at the Almeida Theatre.'The greatest American playwright of his generation ...the most inventive in language and revolutionary in craft' New York magazine

A stunning new play by the great American dramatist Described by Sam Shepard as 'a take-off on Republican fascism', this uncompromising black comedy was written just before the 2004 US presidential election.Frank and Emma are American dairy farmers, alone in the Mid-West. Nothing ever happens. Nothing has happened for years. But now there's a mysterious man hiding in their basement and a government official has come knocking at their door.The God of Hell had its European premiere at the Donmar Warehouse, London, on 20 October 2005.'A robust new farce [that] shows Shepard's gift for finding deadpan surrealism in bucolic speech ...As hilarious as it is sobering' New York Times'Deliriously entertaining and deeply scary ...A shivering work of existential mystery' Newsday'A funny and furious stab at the Bush Administration' The Times

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.

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.