Books by Sam Shepard

When his brother Lee - a drifter and petty thief - decides to stop by, he pitches his own idea for a movie and convinces the producer to ditch Austin's love story for his own trashy Western tale.Now they must work together to secure the deal.

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.

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.

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.

"The greatest American playwright of his generation" (New York Magazine)

This collection shares decades of correspondence between the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and one of his closest friendsincluding personal photos.One of America's leading dramatists, as well as an accomplished actor, screenwriter, and director, Sam Shepard's legacy includes immortal plays like True West andBuried Child, as well as memorable film roles, including his Academy Award-nominated performance in The Right Stuff. Though Shepard remained an intensely private man, he wrote candidly about his life and work in letters to his close friend Johnny Dark. His former father-in-law, Dark became a surrogate brother to Shepard, and even an artistic muse. Two Prospectorsgathers nearly forty years of correspondence and transcribed conversations between them.In these letters, the men open themselves to each other with gripping 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 for actress Jessica Lange), personal struggles, and accumulating years. Illustrated with Dark's photographs of Shepard and their mutual family across many years, as well as facsimiles of numerous letters,Two Prospectorsis 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.

During the last decade, Sam Shepard's most recent plays have been produced in London by the Royal Court Theatre. This collection brings together "A Lie of the Mind", "A Love Ballad...A Little Legend About Love", "States of Shock", and Shepard's most recently staged play, "Simpatico".

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.

In these 17 stories, Sam Shepherd 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 and the anxious gulf that separates men and women.

"A poet of the theatre, shaping a new language out of broken words: an emotional seismograph registering the tremors which shake the substratum of human life" (The Times)

Shepard's play, "State of Shock", turns an anniversary party into a reopening of the wounds of war, sex and family betrayal. This volume includes his screenplays for the films "Far North", which explores the gap between generations and genders, and "Silent Tongue", about white settlers in America.

Also included are Curse of the Starving Class, The Tooth of Crime, La Turista, Tongues and Savage/Love. The volume is introduced by Richard Gilman, who provides a fascinating profile of the author and places the plays in the context of contemporary American drama.

Volume one of Shepard's collected plays brings into print 14 of his legendary short and full-length plays from the 60s, including "The Unseen Hand", "Chicago", "Icarus's Mother", "Red Cross", "Cowboys", "Operation Sidewinder" and "Killer's Head".

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.