Dramatizes how individuals misperceive the world.

The complete scripts to six Sam Shepard plays: The Unseen Hand * Forensic and the Navigators * The Holy Ghostly * Back Bog Beast Bait * Shaved Splits * 4-H Club.

In Fool For Love, situated at a seedy motel on the edge of the Mojave Desert, transient lovers May and Eddie spin around in a room in a relentless struggle for power and truth. Through recollections and dreams, multiple versions of a fierce and fatal love story are told. The Sad Lament of Pecos Bill on the Eve of Killing His Wife, another kind of love story in the form of a comic operetta, takes a distaff view of the Southwest's legendary cowpuncher and his mate Slue-foot Sue, with irreverent commentary on American heroes and heroics. "No one knows better than Sam Shepard that the true American West is gone forever, but there may be no writer alive more gifted at reinventing it out of pure literary air." -Frank Rich, The New York Times "Mr. Shepard is the most deeply serious humorist of the American theater, and a poet with no use whatever for the 'poetic.' He brings fresh news of love, here and now, in all its potency and deviousness and foolishness, and of many other matters as well." -Edith Oliver, The New Yorker Sam Shepard (1943) is a playwright, actor, author, screen writer, and director whose work is performed on and off Broadway and in other theaters across the country. In 1979, he received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play Buried Child. In 1983, he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in The Right Stuff. His other famous works include True West, A Lie of the Mind, and Curse of the Starving Class.

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. ". . .essential reading. A scrapbook of short stories, autobiographical reveries, poetry and photographs, Motel Chronicles is full of verbal delights, as well as insights into its author's entire canon. Whether Mr. Shepard is reminiscing about his parents or daydreaming about cherished movies and cars of his youth, he speaks in pungent and ethereal language that remakes our West. Read in conjunction with the plays, Motel Chronicles also helps demystify the origins of Mr. Shepard's psychological obsessions and desolate frontier iconography." Frank Rich, New York Times "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 half from the works of Sam Shepard." Time "Sam Shepard is a shaman a New World shaman. Sam is as American as peyote, magic mushrooms, Rock and Roll, and medicine bundles." Jack Gelber Sam Shepard (1943) is a playwright, actor, author, screen writer, and director whose work is performed on and off Broadway and in other theaters across the country. In 1979, he received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play Buried Child. In 1983, he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in The Right Stuff. His other famous works include True West, A Lie of the Mind, and Curse of the Starving Class. Fool For Love & the Sad Lament of Pecos Bill by Sam Shepard was also published by City Lights Publishers.

In this collection of more than fifty monologues, short stories and poems--Shepard's first--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. Shepard displays his virtuosic sense of the rhythms of the American landscape.

Comedy / 3m, 1f / Int. Recently revived at New York's Circle in the Square, where Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly alternated playing the roles of the brothers, this American classic explores alternatives that might spring from the demented terrain of the California landscape. Sons of a desert dwelling alcoholic and a suburban wanderer clash over a film script. Austin, the achiever, is working on a script he has sold to producer Sal Kimmer when Lee, a demented petty thief, drops in. He pitches his own idea for a movie to Kimmer, who then wants Austin to junk his bleak, modern love story and write Lee's trashy Western tale. Shepard's masterwork.... It tells us a truth, as glimpsed by a 37 year old genius. - New York Post It's clear, funny, naturalistic. It's also opaque, terrifying, surrealistic. If that sounds contradictory, you're on to one aspect of Shepard's winning genius; the ability to make you think you're watching one thing while at the same time he's presenting another. - San Francisco Chronicle

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

Sam Shepard was arguably America’s finest working dramatist, as well as an accomplished screenwriter, actor, and director. Winner of a Pulitzer Prize, he wrote more than forty-five plays, including True West, Fool for Love, and Buried Child. Shepard also appeared in more than fifty films, beginning with Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven, and was nominated for an Academy Award for his performance in The Right Stuff. Despite the publicity his work and life attracted, however, Shepard remained a strongly private man who said many times that he would never write a memoir. But he did write intensively about his inner life and creative work to his former father-in-law and housemate, Johnny Dark, who was Shepard’s closest friend, surrogate brother (they were nearly the same age), and even artistic muse. Two Prospectors gathers nearly forty years of correspondence and transcribed conversations between Shepard and Dark. In these gripping, sometimes gut-wrenching letters, the men open themselves to each other with amazing 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—Dark’s stepdaughter and grandson—for actress Jessica Lange), personal struggles, and accumulating years. Illustrated with Dark’s candid, revealing photographs of Shepard and their mutual family across many years, as well as facsimiles of numerous letters, Two Prospectors is 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.

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
"

people here have become the people they're pretending to be. 'Sam Shepard's language is sparse and crystal clear. His words appear modest, but they have huge scope.' Wim Wenders This 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. Since 1964 he has mapped out a huge mythic territory...like Whitman, his is vast and contains multitudes, his plays soar over the empty tracts of the Midwest, celebrate the space, energy and naive optimism of the new-found lands.' Time Out

Filled with wry, dark humor, unparalleled imagination, unforgettable characters, and exquisitely crafted storytelling, Sam Shepard's plays have earned him enormous acclaim over the past five decades. In these fifteen one-acts, we see him at his best, displaying his trademark ability to portray human relationships, love, and lust with rare authenticity. These fifteen furiously energetic plays confirm Shepard's status as our most audacious living playwright, unafraid to set genres and archetypes spinning with results that are utterly mesmerizing. Included in this volume:
Ages of the Moon
Evanescence; Shakespeare in the Alley
Short Life of Trouble
The Unseen Hand
The Rock Garden
Chicago
Icarus's Mother
4H Club
Fourteen Hundred Thousand
Red Cross
Cowboys #2
Forensic & The Navigators
The Holy Ghostly
Back Bog Beast Bait
Killer's Head

'Set in a desolate motel room on the edge of the Mojave desert, the play has something of the timeless universality of a Greek tragedy . . . Like ancient classical drama, too, the action is at once brief and relentless. By the end of the 90-minute play you feel you have lived through a cataclysm . . . This is a tremendous play, bleak but savagely funny, apparently naturalistic yet also resonant and dreamlike.' Daily Telegraph Fool for Love is accompanied in this volume by The Sad Lament of Pecos Bill on the Eve of Killing his Wife, a comic operetta by Sam Shepard and Catherine Stone, which takes an irreverent view of American heroes and heroics.

In his daring new play, the inimitable Pulitzer Prize-winning author shows, as only he can, what happens when the secrets simmering within a family boil over. When Roscoe, a 65-year-old Cervantes scholar, runs off with a young woman named Sally, he decides to stay a while in her family home. Soon he discovers that Sally's house - once inhabited by James Dean; perched over the San Fernando valley - is filled with secrets, sadness, and haunted women who cannot leave themselves or anyone else in peace.

A solitary man digs a hole in the ground, near a dead horse. Amidst the clutter of food and equipment stands Hobart Struther, who has ridden all the way out to the middle of nowhere on a holy mission. But one day into his "Great Sojourn," things are looking bleak. His horse has choked to death, he's miles away from civilization, and there's not a person around to talk to - other than himself. As Hobart examines his rise -- how he built a vast art collection while ensconced in a comfortable Park Avenue lifestyle -- he digs deep into his own history, unearthing truths about his past while still struggling to find the answers he needs. With Shepard's linguistic flair, subtle humor, and probing insights, "Kicking a Dead Horse" is an invigorating addition to the works of one of America's most innovative playwrights.

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.

Set within the netherworld of thoroughbred racing, this hair-raisingly funny new play by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of True West explores the classical themes of memory, loyalty, and restitution. Simpatico launches readers into regions where high society meets the low life, and where, as one of the main characters observes, "someone is cutting someone else's throat."

In his latest play, States of Shock, Sam Shepard turns a bizarre anniversary party into a grisly yet hilarious reopening of the wounds of war, sex, and family betrayal. This volume also includes Shepard's screenplay for the film Far North and the forthcoming film Silent Tongue.

Austin, working on his Hollywood screenplay, is disturbed by the arrival of his estranged brother, Lee, just returned from three months in the desert. During a brief spell of uneasy cohabitation in their absent mother's house, Lee employs himself as a door-to-door burglar before killing his brother's film idea by pitching his own to Austin's producer. But Lee is no writer and the brothers must strike a deal, escalating sibling rivalry to fever pitch in the blazing Californian heat. Sam Shephard's True West was first performed at the Magic Theatre, San Francisco, in 1980 and has since become recognised as an American classic.

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"

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, actor, ex-cowboy, and musician Sam Shepard now stands revealed as a storyteller of dazzling artistry. Bleak and wildly funny, touching but stringently unsentimental, these stories give readers a most intimate view of the writer who has become synonymous with the recklessness, stoicism, and solitude of American manhood.

Sam Shepard has been described by the New Yorker as 'one of the most original, prolific and gifted dramatists at work today'. Here are seven of his finest plays, including True West and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Buried Child. 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.