Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... McMinnville Public Library | Shepard, S. | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
n these eighteen elegantly terse stories, Sam Shepard taps the same wellsprings that have made him one of our most acclaimed--and distinctly American--playwrights: sex and regret, the yearning for a frontier that has been subdivided out of existence, the comic gulf of misapprehension between men and women, and the even deeper gulf that separates men from their true selves. A fascinated boy watches the grim contest between a "remedy man"--a fixer of bad horses--and a spectacularly bad-tempered stallion, a contest that mirrors the boy's own struggle with his father. A suburban husband starts his afternoon shopping for basil for a party and ends it holding one of the guests at gunpoint in the basement. Two old men, who have lived together companionably since their wives died or left them and their children scattered to "silicon computer hell," are brought to grief by a waitress at the local Denny's. Filled with absurdity, sorrow, and flinty humor, 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 singular intensity in his work for the theater.
Author Notes
Sam Shepard was born Samuel Shepard Rogers III on an army base in Illinois on November 5, 1943. He briefly studied agriculture at Mount San Antonio College, but dropped out to move to New York in 1962. He wrote more than 55 plays during his lifetime. His first play was produced off-off-Broadway when he was 19 years old and he won the first of his 8 Obie Awards when he was 23 years old. His plays included Chicago, The Tooth of Crime, True West, Fool for Love, A Lie of the Mind, The Late Henry Moss, Heartless, and A Particle of Dread. He received the Pulitzer Prize for drama for Buried Child in 1978.
He was an actor for both film and television. His films included Days of Heaven, The Right Stuff, and Baby Boom. He also appeared in the Netflix series Bloodline. He wrote or co-wrote several screenplays including Far North and Renaldo and Clara with Bob Dylan. He also wrote songs with John Cale and Bob Dylan including Brownsville Girl. He wrote several books including Cruising Paradise and Motel Chronicles. He died from complications of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis on July 27, 2017 at the age of 73.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
"E.V. made no bones about it; he was not a horse whisperer by any stretch," writes Shepard (Cruising Paradise, etc.) in the first of 18 brief stories that make up his new collection. "He could fix bad horses, and when he fixed them they stayed fixed." This terse, weather-beaten "remedy man" turns out to be so observant that he gives a bullied boy a new sense of the truly vast scale of life and of his own possibilities. Some of the tales explore how characters fail to connect with any greater vision. Ambushed by sex, buried in habit or gripped by a desperation they didn't know they possessed, they become like blind forces of nature, some of them terrifying and heartbreaking. At his best, Shepard shows us how in brief, bright moments people wake up from the suck and drag of the distractions that cloud their lives. In "Living the Sign" a young fast-food worker commemorates his moment of lucidity by posting a sign that reads, "`Life is what's happening to you while you're making plans for something else.'" Shepard shows that consciousness calls out to us: eager to track down the employee who made the sign, a patron asks if anyone there seems "particularly auspicious? Particularly present and attentive?" In classic Shepard style, he also shows in the title story how people can fall apart as quickly and with just as much force as they come together. Like "The Remedy Man" himself, these sketches are simple but deeply intuitive and true. (Oct. 22) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Seventeen stories-some of them false starts, some disguised plays, some genuinely elegant pieces-from the veteran playwright, actor, and Pulitzer-winner. Shepard has written 45 plays and one previous story collection (Cruising Paradise, 1996). It tends to show. It's as though he's not always sure what to do with the freedom of prose-there's an uncertainty over how to wade into a character's mind without slipping into the voice one might use on stage. The best pieces here are the first ("The Remedy Man"), whose highly aggressive horse-breaking main character serves as contrast to those with only lightweight understandings of Shepard's country in fiction such as The Horse Whisperer; and "An Unfair Question," which flirts with Chekhov's rule about guns and the third act; and the title story, about two old men and housemates whose friendship is challenged when their favorite Denny's waitress chooses to bestow affections on only one of them. Fine portraits of teenagers-the particular timbre of their voices-come in stories ("Berlin Wall Piece," "The Company's Interest") that nevertheless fail to add up to much. Tales that are focused primarily on a single conversation can be haunting, as in "The Door to Women," in which a grandfather tries to educate a grandson who knows more than the older man thinks, while two tales set around conversations ("Betty's Cats," "It Wasn't Proust") are simply one-act plays in disguise, the first about an elderly woman who doesn't want to get rid of her cats, the second, more significant and complete, about a man relating an absurd adventure in France to convince his mysterious listener not to go there herself. Shepard flirts with form: one story, "Tinnitus," is composed entirely of voice-mail messages, and in another ("Living the Sign") a mysterious narrator unearths the source of a scrap of Zen-style wisdom found on the wall of an even stranger chicken shop. Varied and risky, with brilliances and blunders on an occasional basis.
Booklist Review
Shepard's mastery as a short story writer reflects his gifts as both playwright and actor. He writes and walks the talk, and he's internalized all that he so perspicaciously observes from tone of voice and shift of eye to the texture of dust lifted by a hot desert wind. Shepard's fiction has evolved since his striking first collection, Cruising Paradise (1996). In these highly concentrated stories, he reaches deep into his characters' conflicted souls, and creates near-hallucinatory confrontations in which they're forced to recognize exactly who they are. Shepard's lonely people are as wild at heart and as in need of rescue as the angry horse a "remedy man" comes to heal, or the injured hawk a young woman stops on a highway to help. A traveler divines the spirit of a fast-food worker; a married couple sit beside a lake and quibble; a grandfather tells his grandson, who is secretly in love, the story of his divorced mother's witty revenge on his father; and two dignified old friends let a waitress come between them. Each involving story is psychologically loaded, but what lassoes the reader is the tension between Shepard's acuity and tenderness, his high regard for the recklessness of life. --Donna Seaman
Library Journal Review
These 17 new stories from the prize-winning playwright should not be missed. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| The Remedy Man | p. 3 |
| Coalinga 1/2 Way | p. 11 |
| Berlin Wall Piece | p. 19 |
| Blinking Eye | p. 24 |
| Betty's Cats | p. 32 |
| The Door to Women | p. 43 |
| Foreigners | p. 53 |
| Living the Sign | p. 55 |
| The Company's Interest | p. 65 |
| Concepcion | p. 70 |
| It Wasn't Proust | p. 76 |
| Convulsion | p. 95 |
| An Unfair Question | p. 97 |
| A Frightening Seizure | p. 109 |
| Tinnitus | p. 112 |
| The Stout of Heart | p. 118 |
| Great Dream of Heaven | p. 128 |
| All the Trees Are Naked | p. 140 |