Shepard, Sam

Sam Shepard : Seven Plays (Buried Child, Curse of the Starving Class, The Tooth of Crime, La Turista, Tongues, Savage Love, True West)

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best of Shepard...
an incredible collage of beautiful plays
Essay, Different Ways of Life
The one to start on!
Information about book

Sam Shepard : Seven Plays (Buried Child, Curse of the Starving Class, The Tooth of Crime, La Turista, Tongues, Savage Love, True West)
Sam Shepard
Manufacturer: Dial Press Trade Paperback
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

United States | Drama | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

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Similar Items:

Fool for Love and Other Plays
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Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

ASIN: 0553346113
Release Date: 1984-05-01

Customer Reviews:

best of Shepard..........2007-05-25

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.

an incredible collage of beautiful plays.......2006-06-01

This collection of plays is extraordinary. Shepard threads tales of cartoonlike characters bound by the direst of circumstances excellently.

Essay, Different Ways of Life.......2004-11-23

11th grade English Essay
Phillips Academy, Andover

"True West"

The play is about the struggle between modern society and more traditional ways of life. Lee and Austin represent two disconnected brothers with drastically different upbringings who have come to accept different norms. Against the growth of the city and the suburb, their spirit of the Wild West, though diminished, still exists. They steal and fight just like cowboys and highway robbers. Yet, both Lee and Austin are scared and frustrated. Lee doesn't know if he should try to blend into the new ways, and Austin doesn't know if he should go back to the old ways. And this play about two writers writing about the West is in itself a Western story. It has all the excitement and violence of a rider's life.

Who else would steal a dozen toasters and TVs? Austin and Lee were lawless and wild, daring enough to do anything. Austin's car is like a horse, and driving out is like going for a raid. "Lee enters abruptly into kitchen carrying a stolen TV set." The sentence has such an air of ease as if Lee entered with a Shopping bag. Stealing is no more than a normal part of Lee's life. He lives off of it, like those high-way riders who plunder by-passers in the old days. The wholesale raid of the toasters shows the wilder side of Austin." It was toasters you challenged me to. Only toasters. I ignored other temptation." He says to Lee after the thievery. These words make Austin sound like a warrior who has just beaten his rival in some major battle. The only irony is that the major battle was about stealing a dozen toasters. Austin is bragging about his lawlessness, and that is a very cowboy thing to do. Not only are these brothers such "professional" thief, they also are more than violent. From Lee "ax-chops(ing) at the typewriter using a nine-iron" to Austin trying to choke his brother with a telephone cord while their mom is standing on the side. It is hard to get worse than that. It is like a misplaced scene from a Old Western movie. Not only do these pair of thief like to kill each other, they also have that independence and individualism that Western heroic images render so forcefully. On top of living on the desert by himself, Lee also says "I don't sleep." , and does not seem to eat breakfast. "Do you Eat Breakfast?" "Look, don't worry about me pal. I can take care of myself." When Austin asks him if he needs any help with money, "Lee suddenly lungs at Austin, grabs him violently by the shirt and shakes him with tremendous power." Lee wants money, but he is going to get it by himself, not through his little brother. Lawless, violent, and independent, Lee and Austin are depicted in the play as the "True Western Heroes" borne at a wrong time. This, however, is only the first layer of the play. It makes the story entertaining, but not meaningful.

"Yappin' their fool heads off. They don't yap like that on the desert. They howl. These are city coyotes here." The deeper meaning of the play is about the difference between the city "coyotes" and the country "coyotes". The country "coyote", Lee, is older, lives on a desert, use to catch snakes, and uneducated. The city "coyote", Austin, is younger, writes screen plays, does not remember having ever caught snakes, and has an Ivy League education. The brothers grew up together, but went onto totally different paths of life. But they don't merely represent two disgruntled brothers, but the struggle between the different ways of life. In Austin's eyes, the place where they used to live is "built up", but in Lee's eyes, the place has been "wiped out". But the struggle is not that simple. At the same time of feeling deep nostalgia, and refusing to adapt to the new way with help from his brother, because "it is too cold up there." , Lee also says the new houses that he saw were "like a paradise" with "Blonde people movin' in and outa' the rooms." Lee is deeply rooted in the old way of life and very unprepared socially and mentally for anything other than roaming around and stealing things. He likes comfort like anyone else, but the life of those living in those houses is like "paradise". They are far and aloft, and are not in his reach. Lee wants to write something to change his life, and Austin tells him that he can really turn things around and buy a ranch. Lee's excitement was obvious, " (laughs) A ranch? I could get a ranch?" We can see that it is very clear that even when Lee tries to change, he is only trying to change back to the old ways. Austin at the end of the play suddenly made a deal with Lee asking his brother to bring him to the desert. This shows the conflict at the other end of spectrum. Austin has more money, and has a seemingly good life. But is he really happy? Is his frustration with life any less than Lee's? No. The society that he has so well adapted to is of little comfort to him. He tries for years to get a screenplay to production, but at the whim of an executive, the deal goes to his brother. Austin is frustrated, and though he types betters, suffers as much. Lee asks Austin "maybe we're too intelligent..... One of us has even got a Ivy League Diploma. Now that means somethin' don't it?" But no, it doesn't mean as much as it seems.

The truth is, the old West as it was disappeared long ago. It is no longer filled with rugged mountains, uncharted rivers, cowboy hats, and one does not have the freedom to roam around for thousands of miles with only wild animals as his companion anymore. The untamed natural world went away a hundred years ago with the railroads, and has been changing even more ever since. It is sad to see the past go by for those who grew up as a part of it. Faced with new situations, some of these people try to adapt, some have no chance to adapt, and some don't even want to adapt. And for those who have adapted, they wonder if the decision to change in the first place was valid after all. They wonder if they should go back. That poor Lee had no chance to adapt. He was left out by progresses, and envies dearly the seemingly much more comfortable life that others have. Austin at the same time is in the mainstream of modern life, but he is just as troubled and depressed by commercialism. However, within all these confusions and fightings, all these differences and changes, there is something that has always stayed the same, and that is the true spirit of the West, the "True West". The motivation for people to go to the West in the first place is also the motivation that made the world more modernized. The struggles that the first settlers of the West faced were no different from the struggles that people now face as they move into new ways of life. That spirit is not limited to time nor place, it is about the fundamental human eagerness for new and for more, and at the same time, the unquenchable ties to the past.

The one to start on!.......2002-09-24

The basic text of the most exciting playwright of recent decades. The place to start when discovering the American drama as reader, actor, or teacher!

Information about book.......2002-03-15

First of all, brilliant plays, still classics of the American Theater. Since Amazon no longer has information about this book, I will supply it:
The title of the book is: Sam Shepard: Seven Plays
It includes the full text to 7 of his plays, including:
Buried Child
Curse of the Starving Class
The Tooth of Crime
La Turista
Tongues
Savage Love
and True West

Book Description

Famous for his often manic and always humorous monologues, Gray was, by the late 1990s, in a happy marriage living in Long Island, doing yoga every day. But his life became unhinged after a devastating car accident in Ireland in 2001, which fractured his skull and crushed his hip. It sent Gray into a deep and unremitting depression. But the fact that Spalding had begun performing a new piece in October of last year gave his friends and family reason to hope that he was emerging from his despair. The monologue recounts the story of the accident and Grays hospitalization in Ireland with gallows humor: The following day I slipped into a depression and I didnt know whether to tell the Irish about it, whether they would acknowledge this depression. I mean, does a fish know its swimming in water? Its indigenous to the rainy culture. The last time Gray performed his work-in-progress Life Interrupted at PS 122, he also read a short story called The Anniversary, about the afternoon he spent with young Theo at the Carousel in Central Park on the tenth anniversary of the day he met his wife, Kathie Russo. Like the unfinished monologue, this piece is also much darker than Grays early work. The third piece in this collection is a very short, remarkably poignant letter Spalding wrote about the terrorist attacks of September 11, titled Dear New York City.

Customer Reviews:

If you liked his other works, you'll love this fast read........2007-01-04

I've been a great Gray fan for years. Reading this monologe brings you back into the theater with him again. Read on a quick flight to Boston, I could see hear his monotone stories gain, telling me of his life, and taking me to that wonderful place that only he and old radio dramas could.

Spalding gives us something to think about, and departs........2006-08-18

A celebrity is someone whom you've never actually met, but think you know; not just know about, but know. The celebrity press offers us little bits of enticing, patently untrue information about these imaginary friends every day. Part of our agreement with the idea of celebrity is that we believe these things while knowing (after all, we're not crazy) that they aren't true.

It was easy to slip into thinking of Spalding Gray, who after all never pretended to be anything but an actor and a sort of amateur writer, as a celebrity. Since his confessional monologues included much that was embarrassing and painful, it was easier that way. Apparently, though, every word of it was true. His sadness, his eerily prophetic but still crippling fears, his inability, like so many children of suicides, to get on with his life -- it was all there. It was all, or at least mostly true, and we really knew him after all, and the guilt at not having been able to save him, at having been not an imaginary friend but a real one, and not a very good one, is real as well.

His monologues were surprisingly layered, nuanced and durable works of art, considering he never claimed much for himself as a writer. They are like Chekhov plays without villains -- not so dark, or so funny, and a bit sweeter than you'd like, maybe, but still great, and this is the last of them.

A Bittersweet Homage to Spalding Gray.......2006-05-31

Nearing his 60th birthday in 2001, Spalding Gray was enjoying family life with his wife and two kids, and pondering the next step in his career as a popular monologue performer and writer.

Then a horrific car accident in Ireland changed everything for Gray. Severe injuries left him debilitated for months, with chronic severe pain afterwards, and plunged him into deep depression.

Yet he still tried to transform his painful, frightening and darkly humorous experiences into art, as he has done so many other times. Performing early drafts of his solo memoir of the crash (under the working title "Black Spot", which refers to the patch of road in Ireland where his accident occurred) at Seattle's 2001 Bumbershoot Festival, and later in New York, it looked like he was going to triumph again. But sadly it was not to be (Spalding Grey committed suicide in 2004 at the age of 62, leaving a note stating that he could no longer live with his debilitating pain and depression).

This short book combines that last unfinished script with various short tributes to Gray by actor Eric Bogosian (another favorite performer/monologist/writer of mine) and others.

For 20 years now, I have admired Gray. He was someone who made yakking about his life and himself so engaging and endearing, that I always left his solo monologues wanting to hear more. His books were also equally entertaining.

For any Gray fan, this small book is homage to his unique gifts, and a reminder of the fragility and preciousness of life itself.

Final Grade: A

It's really only 56 pages........2005-11-08

When I saw that it was 256 pages I thought it was all going to be stuff that Spalding Gray had written. I was really excited to get this book, thinking that I'd have at least a few days worth of reading to do. Unfortunately only 56 of those 256 pages are actually his work. The forward by Francine Prose goes from pg 17-49. "Life Interrupted" goes from pgs 53-92 (40 pages). "The Anniversary" goes from pgs 95-109 (15 pages). "Dear New York City" is pg 113. The rest of the book, pgs 121-255, are eulogies. I would have preferred to just get a skinny little 56 page book of only his work. I realize that this book in essence was to be a dedication to Spalding Gray's life and last days. A way for his friends and family to celebrate his existance in their lives and say goodbye to him. It is a good book and well worth the money, but I would have preferred to just get his writings sans wordy forward and eulogies.

Spalding Gray's parting monologue........2005-10-24

"If you had to reduce all of Spalding's work to its essence, its core," Francine Prose writes in her Foreward to Gray's last major monologue, "if you wanted to locate the subject to which, no matter what else he talked about, he kept returning, I suppose you could say that his work was a profoundly metaphysical inquiry into how we manage to live despite the knowledge we are someday going to die. How are we to love the world and the people we care about most even when we know that someday we will lose it all and our loved ones will have to continue without us" (pp. 43-44)?

Perhaps best known for SWIMMING TO CAMBODIA (1988) and GRAY'S ANATOMY (1994), Spalding Gray committed suicide last year at the age of 62, leaving behind his wife, Kathleen Russo, a stepdaughter, Marissa, and two sons, Forrest and Theo. In his unfinished work in progress, LIFE INTERRUPTED, Gray tells of his trip to Ireland to celebrate his 60th birthday, which ended with a gruesome car crash leaving him severely injured and depressed. That incident not only became the catalyst for Gray's return to writing from his "quiet life" of domestic bliss in Sag Harbor, but the turning point in his life, ultimately leading to suicide. From the transvestite with green fingernails offering him toast and tea (p. 67-68), to his Pakastani doctors, to his attempts to try to get along with the blaring televisions (p. 71), to his musings on how an intelligent country like America could "elect such a dud like George Bush" (p. 80), Gray finds never-ending humor in his grim predicament, while recovering from his injuries in an Irish country hospital. Spalding Gray's parting monologue offers such sweet sorrow.

The book concludes with several short eulogies by Gray's friends (Laurie Anderson, John Perry Barlow, Eric Bogosian, Eric Stoltz and many more), delivered in memorial services at Lincoln Center and in Sag Harbor.

G. Merritt

Average customer rating:

best of Shepard Vol. II
These plays range from the surreal to the all too real...

Fool for Love and Other Plays
Sam Shepard
Manufacturer: Dial Press Trade Paperback
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Similar Items:

Sam Shepard : Seven Plays (Buried Child, Curse of the Starving Class, The Tooth of Crime, La Turista, Tongues, Savage Love, True West)
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The Collected Plays Of Edward Albee: Volume 1 1958 - 1965
The God of Hell

ASIN: 0553345907
Release Date: 1984-11-01

Book 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

Customer Reviews:

best of Shepard Vol. II.......2007-05-25

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..........1998-07-07

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.

Average customer rating:

"...when something's been said a thousand times before..."
Great Play
my review

True West
Sam Shepard
Manufacturer: Samuel French
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Topdog/Underdog
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Doubt: A Parable

ASIN: 0573617287

Book Description

Premiered in San Francisco in 1980, True West is one of Sam Shepard's funniest plays, as well as one of his most brutal. Austin is a stable, successful Hollywood screenwriter, Lee his menacing vagabond brother, and True West is the story of their attempt to trade lives. Their tragicomic quest to change identity ends in a stalemate, but along the way this Pulitzer Prize-winning author takes gleeful potshots at Hollywood, the myth of the frontier, and the escape fantasies that drive the American imagination. “By far the funniest, truest, and most mesmerizing play on Broadway.” — New York Daily News

Customer Reviews:

"...when something's been said a thousand times before...".......2002-10-30

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.......2002-05-16

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.......2001-03-28

this play is great, buy it!

Average customer rating:

sam is the man
Not a major work but it fascinates
Excellent
Very moving
A travel with a natural born traveller

Motel Chronicles
Sam Shepard
Manufacturer: City Lights Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0872861430

Book Description

Motel Chronicles reveals the fast-moving and sometimes surprising world of the man behind the plays that have made Sam Shepard a live legend in the theater. Shepard chronicles his own life birth in Illinois, childhood memories of Guam, Pasadena and rural Southern California, adventures as ranch hand, waiter, rock musician, dramatist, and film actor. Scenes from this book form the basis of his play Superstitions, and of the film (directed by Wim Wenders) Paris, Texas, winner of the Golden Palm Award at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival.

Customer Reviews:

sam is the man.......2006-05-13

i'm so glad there are sam shepherds populating our little planet earth...

Not a major work but it fascinates.......2003-12-02

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.......2002-08-17

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.......2001-04-25

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.

A travel with a natural born traveller.......1999-12-20

Motel Chronicles is a fine example how aubiographical stories can be well written and it is an excellent trip through real America: the long roads, the Indians, the Cowboys, the desert... Sam Shepard is an excellent playwright and he also writes scripts for movies. It is a surprise for all who are used to his "hard prose" in theatre and in cinema reading the softness of his prose and the almost "delicacy" of these chronicles. After this book, I do recommend you all "Cruising Paradise".

Average customer rating:

His Most Popular Play Among Playwrights
Not up to par....
An accurate portrayal of imperfect human nature.

A Lie of the Mind.
Sam Shepard
Manufacturer: Dramatist's Play Service
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Fool for Love
Sam Shepard : Seven Plays (Buried Child, Curse of the Starving Class, The Tooth of Crime, La Turista, Tongues, Savage Love, True West)
On Method Acting
The Vietnam Plays: Volume II: Streamers and The Orphan (Rabe, David)
The Unseen Hand and Other Plays by Sam Shepard

ASIN: 0822206560

Customer Reviews:

His Most Popular Play Among Playwrights.......2001-11-29

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...........2001-10-20

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........2000-04-06

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 switching between the homes of two different, yet strongly connected families. One of the crowning achievements of this drama is that it draws you in and makes you feel for the characters of the two midwestern families, especially Beth, the now-mentally damaged wife of Jake. I have not seen this play performed but if the written play can draw you the reader in so deeply, 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-written plays.

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True East
A Keeper
VINTAGE DYLAN

Rolling Thunder Logbook
Sam Shepard
Manufacturer: Da Capo Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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On the Road With Bob Dylan
Dylan: Visions, Portraits, & Back Pages
Bob Dylan - Don't Look Back (1965 Tour Deluxe Edition)
Bob Dylan - No Direction Home
The Bob Dylan Scrapbook, 1956-1966

ASIN: 0306813718
Release Date: 2004-12-14

Book Description

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.

Customer Reviews:

True East.......2007-04-02

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.

A Keeper.......2006-08-25

The perfect companion to Sloman's book, especially given the great photography.

Arm yourself with these two books and a circulating audience tape from late '75 and you will treated to the Essence of Bob Dylan.

VINTAGE DYLAN.......2001-01-06

This book is an excellent look behind the scenes of Dylan's Rolling Thunder Review which made it's way through New England back in the Fall of '75. Sam Shepard has done a great job of capturing the feel and characters that surrounded this historic tour. Not to be missed by any true Dylan fan.

Hawk Moon: Short Stories, Poems, and Monologues (PAJ Books)

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Blood & Sex
Genius

Hawk Moon: Short Stories, Poems, and Monologues (PAJ Books)
Sam Shepard
Manufacturer: PAJ Publications
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Similar Items:

Motel Chronicles
Great Dream of Heaven: Stories
Cruising Paradise: Tales
The Unseen Hand and Other Plays by Sam Shepard
Sam Shepard : Seven Plays (Buried Child, Curse of the Starving Class, The Tooth of Crime, La Turista, Tongues, Savage Love, True West)

ASIN: 0933826230

Book Description

In this collection of monologues, short stories and poems, one of America's most acclaimed writers and actors reflects on growing up in America, rock and roll, the sex of fishes, and other topics.

Customer Reviews:

Blood & Sex.......2002-08-17

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.......2000-08-20

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 of fiction, is beautiful, delicate, powerful, intimitely connected to the natural world and perhaps the world of spirits, as well as a pre-cursor to his future prose, poems and plays. If you wish to experience an America that has for the most part vanished for forever, an America that is rarely talked about in truth on our cable, radio, and internet, then pick up either this book, Motel Chronicles, or Cruising Paradise. All three are unique companion pieces, spread some twenty five years apart in publication, and well worth owning.

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Excellent Collection of Short Stories Full of Actual Humans on the Brink
Sam's way . . .
Reality stripped to essentials
Prose Dramas
In These Slim Pages.....................

Great Dream of Heaven: Stories
Sam Shepard
Manufacturer: Vintage
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Cruising Paradise: Tales
Motel Chronicles
Hawk Moon: Short Stories, Poems, and Monologues (PAJ Books)
The Late Henry Moss, Eyes for Consuela, When the World Was Green: Three Plays
The God of Hell

ASIN: 0375704523
Release Date: 2003-11-11

Amazon.com

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

Book 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.

Customer Reviews:

Excellent Collection of Short Stories Full of Actual Humans on the Brink.......2007-05-20

"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.

Sam's way . . ........2006-07-09

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.......2003-09-02

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.

Prose Dramas.......2003-04-10

"Great Dreams of Heaven" is a quick read at a breezy 142 pages. Some of these stories would jump alive in an oral reading because they are essentially prose dramas. "Betty's Cats" is a wonderful example of a lady who just refuses to see that a trailer full of cats, even if they stink and complaints have been made to the health department, could be a nuisance to anyone. "Living the Sign" is a great little drama about a guy who stops into a fast food shop, sees a handwritten sign, "Life is what's happening to you while you're making plans for something else." He proceeds to grill the counter clerks until he find out who wrote the sign. After the long investigation, he finds his answer in the geeky Dicky; the piece ends with a little profundity about plans. My favorite story is "It Wasn't Proust" which is essentially an argument between a husband & wife over past romances in France; the dialogue sparkles with the banter having edge & wit. While a couple stories are too short to gain momentum and a couple are puzzle pieces, overall this a wonderful blend of prose and drama. Enjoy!

In These Slim Pages............................2003-04-07

Shepard, the well-known playwright and actor, has written eighteen brief stories that are filled with unforgettable images. They deal with the unexpected reactions of human nature, especially sex and the yearnings for things that no longer exist. Shepard is at his best with these stories as he clearly and effortless describes the sorrows, joys, and fallibility of everyday life.

I enjoyed all of Shepardýs stories in his second collection of fiction. It would be hard to choose any one favorite, but ýBlinking Eyeý is one I will never forget. It will leave an unforgettable image on your mind. It is about a young girl driving cross-country bearing an urn containing her motherýs ashes when she encounters an injured hawk on the side of the road. She decides to take the injured hawk to a veterinarian for help. What happens after she places the hawk in her car will definitely leave a vivid image in your mind forever.

Shepardýs gift of writing is effortless to read for he brings all of his stories to life in a clear, concise, and beautifully detailed matter. This is a book not to be missed!!

Book 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

Customer Reviews:

All portent, no payoff.......2002-07-09

Shephard's 1995 revision of his play that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1979 builds tension for two acts and dissipates it in the third. If it is "symbolic," the symbols are opaque. There is the trademark Shephard old crank (Dodge), sons who don't get along (Tilden and Bradley), outbreaks of smashed crockery, and a young man unsuccessfully seeking recognition (Vince). There is also a blatantly unfaithful wife (Halie) and a nervous younger woman (Vince's girlfriend Shelly). Their ennui and ambivalences are on the family's "old home place" in Illinois rather than in a desert that mirrors the desolation of the fissioned nuclear family.

The play can be read(/performed) as comedy rather than existentialist tragedy, especially since it sputters out rather than achieving catharsis. It seems to me that Harold Pinter's "The Homecoming" is a more effective vision of a similar return "home" to a viper's next and that the third act of "Buried Child" would be better if Shelly established her dominance rather than Vince inheriting the place after Dodge's (perhaps unreliable) confession.

A two-fold level in Buried Child.......2000-10-12

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.......2000-01-31

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, 2 women, one set.

Daring American Theater by an underrated playwright.......1999-05-23

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.

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