Great Dream of Heaven:
Stories
by Sam Shepard
Book Description
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.
From the Back
Cover
"These are wonderful
stories, by turns intuitive and well-wrought, satisfyingly
unpredictable, smart, irreverent, knowledgeable about important
human matters, often quite sweet, and at all times a pure pleasure
to read. Mr. Shepard absolutely makes the form be his own, and for
that reason these stories are irresistible."
--Richard
Ford
About the
Author
Sam Shepard is the
Pulitzer Prize–winning author of more than forty-five plays as well
as the story collection Cruising Paradise and two volumes of
prose pieces, Motel Chronicles and Hawk Moon. As an
actor he has appeared in more than twenty-five films, and he
received an Oscar nomination in 1984 for his performance in The
Right Stuff. His screenplay for Paris, Texas won
the Golden Palm Award at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival, and he wrote
and directed the film Far North in 1988. Shepard’s plays,
eleven of which have won Obie Awards, include Buried Child,
The Late Henry Moss, Simpatico, Curse of the
Starving Class, True West, Fool for Love, and A
Lie of the Mind, which won a New York Drama Desk Award. A member
of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Shepard received the
Gold Medal for Drama from the Academy in 1992, and in 1994 he was
inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame. He lives in
Minnesota. |
