Sam Shepard – författare

A stunning new play by the great American dramatist Described by Sam Shepard as 'a take-off on Republican fascism', this uncompromising black comedy was written just before the 2004 US presidential election.Frank and Emma are American dairy farmers, alone in the Mid-West. Nothing ever happens. Nothing has happened for years. But now there's a mysterious man hiding in their basement and a government official has come knocking at their door.The God of Hell had its European premiere at the Donmar Warehouse, London, on 20 October 2005.'A robust new farce [that] shows Shepard's gift for finding deadpan surrealism in bucolic speech ...As hilarious as it is sobering' New York Times'Deliriously entertaining and deeply scary ...A shivering work of existential mystery' Newsday'A funny and furious stab at the Bush Administration' The Times

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.

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 familyFrom the Trade Paperback edition.

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.From the Trade Paperback edition.

One of the plays that first announced Sam Shepard as an original voice in American theater, Tooth of Crime is his thrillingly innovative rock drama, published here in a revised edition that is as fresh and provocative as the original was more than thirty years ago.An aging rock star in a world in which entertainment and street warfare go hand in hand, Hoss must defend himself against Crow, a newcomer who battles him for fame. Combining musical styles and intense dialogue in an unconventional musical-fantasy, Tooth of Crime riffs brilliantly on rising stars and fading legends, and rock lived and died for.From the Trade Paperback edition.

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.From the Trade Paperback edition.

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."From the Trade Paperback edition.

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.

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.From the Hardcover edition.

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.From the Trade Paperback edition.

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 MoonEvanescence; Shakespeare in the AlleyShort Life of TroubleThe Unseen HandThe Rock GardenChicagoIcarus’s Mother4H ClubFourteen Hundred ThousandRed CrossCowboys #2Forensic & The NavigatorsThe Holy GhostlyBack Bog Beast BaitKiller’s Head

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 precariously over the San Fernando valley—is filled with secrets, sadness, and haunted women who cannot leave themselves or anyone else in peace. From Lucy, Sally’s suspicious sister, to Mable, their Shakespeare-quoting invalid mother, to Elizabeth, Mable’s lovely and mysteriously mute nurse, the forces of the house conspire to make Roscoe question his assumptions about everything. As scars and histories are revealed, Shepard shows, as only he can, what happens when the secrets simmering within a family boil over. Heartless masterfully explores the irrevocability of our pasts—and the possibility of life begun anew.

"The greatest American playwright of his generation" (New York Magazine) Winner of the New York Drama Critics Award as the best play of the year. A Lie of the Mind is described by its author as a "love ballad...a little legend about love". Frank Rich of the New York Times described it as "a variously rending and hilarious reverie about parents and sons and husbands and wives, all blending into mythic wildernes..." The play was revived by the Donmar Warehouse in 2001.

Sam Shepard is 'the greatest American playwright of his generation...the most inventive in language and revolutionary in craft...the writer whose work most accurately maps the interior and exterior landscapes of his society' New York magazine

"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) There's money to be made on the Kentucky racecourses - and off them. Carter will pay whatever Vinnie asks for his silence and has done for years. But now, when Vinnie summons Carter to his bleak room in Cucamonga, he's decided that Carter should be made to pay more fully. In his new play about the tough world of the racing fraternity, Sam Shepard examines guilt and restitution and the real hold of the past.Simpatico premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in London in April 1995

Sam Shepard is 'the greatest American playwright of his generation...the most inventive in language and revolutionary in craft...the writer whose work most accurately maps the interior and exterior landscapes of his society' (New York magazine) Volume One of Sam Shepard's plays collects fourteen of his legendary plays from the sixties: The Unseen Hand; The Rock Garden; Chicago; Icarus's Mother; 4-H Club; Fourteen Hundred Thousand;Red Cross; Cowboys#2; Forensic & The Navigators; The Holy Ghostly; Operation Sidewinder;The Mad Dog Blues; Back Boy Beast Bait; Killer's Head."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)

Sam Shepard is 'the greatest American playwright of his generation...the most inventive in language and revolutionary in craft...the writer whose work most accurately maps the interior and exterior landscapes of his society' (New York magazine) "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)

Family intrigue in major new work from America's finest playwright In Bernalillo New Mexico, Ray and Earl return home to mark the passing of their estranged father, Henry. Over a bottle of bourbon and a box of old photographs, tales of their childhoods emerge. As they encounter Henry's bizarre collection of friends, including his wild voracious lover, the colourful circumstances surrounding his death provoke violent suspicion.The Late Henry Moss received its European premiere on 12 January 2006 at the Almeida Theatre.'The greatest American playwright of his generation ...the most inventive in language and revolutionary in craft' New York magazine

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.From the Hardcover edition.

The final work from the Pulitzer Prize–winning writer, actor, and musician, drawn from his transformative last days   In searing, beautiful prose, Sam Shepard’s extraordinary narrative leaps off the page with its immediacy and power. It tells in a brilliant braid of voices the story of an unnamed narrator who traces, before our rapt eyes, his memories of work, adventure, and travel as he undergoes medical tests and treatments for a condition that is rendering him more and more dependent on the loved ones who are caring for him. The narrator’s memories and preoccupations often echo those of our current moment—for here are stories of immigration and community, inclusion and exclusion, suspicion and trust. But at the book’s core, and his, is family—his relationships with those he loved, and with the natural world around him. Vivid, haunting, and deeply moving, Spy of the First Person takes us from the sculpted gardens of a renowned clinic in Arizona to the blue waters surrounding Alcatraz, from a New Mexico border town to a condemned building on New York City’s Avenue C. It is an unflinching expression of the vulnerabilities that make us human—and an unbound celebration of family and life.

'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 TelegraphFool 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.