Sam Shepard

"True West is a character study that examines the relationship between Austin, a screenwriter, and his older brother Lee. It is set in the kitchen of their mother's home 40 miles east of Los Angeles. Austin is house-sitting while their mother is in Alaska, and there he is confronted by his brother, who proceeds to bully his way into staying at the house and using Austin's car. In addition, the screenplay which Austin is pitching to his connection in Hollywood somehow gets taken over by the pushy con-man tactics of Lee, and the brothers find themselves forced to cooperate in the creation of a story that will make or break both their lives"--Sam-Shepard.com.

With Additional Materials

True West

A squalid farm populated by the members of a troubled family--alcoholic Dodge; his sanctimonious wife, Halie; and their sons, Tilden, a former athlete and near idiot, and Bradley, who has lost one of his legs to a chain saw--forms the setting for a confrontation with the dark secrets of the past, thanks to the arrival of Bradley's estranged son, Vince, and his girlfriend. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Reprint.

A Play

Buried Child

Follows an unnamed narrator as he shares memories of work, adventure, and travel as he undergoes medical tests and treatments that leave him increasingly dependent on the loved ones who are caring for him.

Spy of the First Person

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.

Motel Chronicles

Joseph Chaikin

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

Seven Plays

The first work of long fiction from the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright--a tour de force of memory, mystery, death, and life. 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. More and more, memory is overtaking him: in his mind he sees himself in a movie-set trailer, his young face staring back at him in a mirror surrounded by light bulbs. In his dreams and in visions he sees his late father--sometimes in miniature, sometimes flying planes, sometimes at war. By turns, 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 jazz, 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.

The One Inside

Fool for love, and other plays

In a series of tales set mainly in the west, a man is trapped inside a Cracker Barrel restaurant where an endless loop of Shania Twain songs is playing, a wandering actor recounts his teenage debaucheries with an old friend, and a squabbling family remains oblivious to their Yucatán vacation. By a Pulitzer Prize-winning author.

Stories

Day Out of Days

A collection of short stories explores acts of personal revelation set against the varied locales of the American landscape

Cruising Paradise

THE STORY: The scene is a stark motel room at the edge of the Mojave Desert. May, a disheveled young woman, sits dejectedly on a rumpled bed while Eddie, a rough-spoken rodeo performer, crouches in a corner fiddling with his riding gear. When he at

Fool for Love

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.

Great Dream of Heaven

کودک مدفون

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.

The God of Hell

Icimdeki Kisi

THE STORY: The setting is a farmhouse in the American West, inhabited by a family who has enough to eat but not enough to satisfy the other hungers that bedevil them. The father is a drunk; the mother a frowzy slattern; the daughter precocious beyo

A Play in Three Acts

Curse of the Starving Class

THE STORY: Involves two desperate families connected by the marriage of the son of one (Jake) to the daughter of the other (Beth). As the play begins Beth, brain-damaged from a savage beating that Jake has given her, is being tended by her parents,

A Lie of the Mind

Drama. Sam Shepard's FOOL FOR LOVE is arguably the playwright's best known play. Focusing, as many of Shepard's plays do, on the dark side of life in the West, FOOL FOR LOVE was first produced at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco in February, 1983, before moving to Off-Broadway at the Circle Repertory Theatre in May of that year. Shepard himself directed these original productions, winning Obie Awards for his writing and directing as well as the award for best new American play.

Automne 1975 : Bob Dylan et sa revue Rolling Thunder - que l'artiste considérait comme une troupe de cirque gitan itinérant - partaient en tournée à travers vingt-deux villes des Eats-Unis. La côte Est conservatrice découvrit avec stupeur ces saltimbanques prônant liberté et expériences en tout genre parmi lesquels Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, Allen Ginsberg... Acteur et témoin de cette incroyable aventure, Sam Shepard, à qui avait été proposé l'écriture du film, raconte cette tournée mythique. Si le long-métrage ne vit jamais le jour, Shepard ne se priva pas de décrire à sa manière la folle créativité, la fête ininterrompue et la réelle amitié qui unissait tous ces artistes dans un texte resté jusqu'alors inédit. Sous la plume d'un grand écrivain, voici un document exceptionnel sur une époque mais surtout, une vision inédite du charisme et du talent généreux de Bob Dylan.

sur la route avec Bob Dylan

Rolling Thunder

Nella sua casa circondata dai pioppi, mentre un coyote ulula in lontananza, un uomo ripercorre la distanza tra il presente e il passato. Poco a poco viene travolto dalla memoria, sopraffatto dai ricordi. Si rivede così su un set cinematografico, mentre il suo volto più giovane lo fissa dentro a uno specchio circondato da lampadine. In sogno gli sovviene suo padre da vecchio – a volte in miniatura, altre ai comandi di un aereo durante la guerra. Ricorda poi l’America della sua infanzia, il terreno della fattoria e il recinto del bestiame, le rotaie e i diner – e ripensa ossessivamente alla giovane fidanzata del padre, con la quale aveva avuto una storia anche lui, motore di un dramma che da allora non ha mai smesso di scavargli dentro. Il suo mondo interiore si schiude al cospetto delle montagne e dei deserti, mentre attraversa il paese in auto sospinto dal jazz, dalla benzedrina, dal rock and roll, dall’irrequietezza di un esilio sentimentale, di un evocativo congedo dal tempo. In questo splendido, bruciante romanzo di Sam Shepard, i ritmi del teatro, il linguaggio della poesia e l’ironia sottile della narrativa si intrecciano in un racconto sulla vita: festoso, surreale, commovente, indimenticabile.

Sam Shepard

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