The basic text of the most exciting playwright of recent decades. The place to start when discovering the American drama as reader, actor, or teacher!

First of all, brilliant plays, still classics of the American Theater. Since Amazon no longer has information about this book, I will supply it:
The title of the book is: Sam Shepard: Seven Plays
It includes the full text to 7 of his plays, including:
Buried Child
Curse of the Starving Class
The Tooth of Crime
La Turista
Tongues
Savage Love
and True West

Fantastic collection in one book. 336 pages, has gone through repeated re-printings

Sam Shepard is an american original. I first encountered his work at the Public theater in NYC in the early to mid-70's. Then having seen Buried Child, i knew I had to read his work. His language is spare, tough and elagaic, like Cormac mcCarthy's novels of the southwest. The best work hee oare the first three plays: True West, Buried Child and Curse of the Starving class.Shepard is a poet of the interior,his convaluted families express despair over hideous personal tagiedies{Buried Child] or their own inability to love{True West]. Shepeard use of language is interesting. It is its strongest when it reflects the rhythm of a place or time,{curse of the Starving Class} and ,for me at least, is most evocative of a place either real or imagined,very much Shepard country.{I saw a young John Malkovich in a Shepard play} Now far better known for his acting{The right stuff, et, al],when Buried child first premiered, he was still a poet/playwrite living out west who refused to fly and who was commisioned by Bob Dylan to write a screenplay for his abortive Rolling Thunder Review movie, Renaldo and Clara...Brilliant,Blistering theatre,that has held up well these 20 years. A True American Master.HIghest possible Recommendation.

Being a graduate theatre student, I've read almost all of Shepard's plays and a great deal of Shepard criticism, and consider this book to be among the most insightful. From the title, I expected a narrow examination of character and conflict. But, in fact, the book is much more than that. It also charts--in precise structural and thematic terms--Shepard's metamohposis from a purely instinctual (and "speed"-driven) young playwright to an iconoclastic storyteller in firm control of his craft. This is a book for both those who have only recently discovered Shepard's work and those (like myself) who thought that they had already cracked the code.

All of the great American playwrights, I find Shepard to be the most elusive. Unlike many of his predecessors, Shepard doesn't connnect all the dots; his characters don't stay put, his plots are slippery, and even his themes are sometimes difficult to pin down. Watching or reading a Shepard play is like living on a fault line--you never know when the ground will give way or where you'll finally end up. Which is why I so appreciated A BODY ACROSS THE MAP. It is cogent, well-written, and clarifies, without over-simplifying--some of the more mysterious aspects of Shepard's work. Also, by examining the father-son conflict in plays written over a twenty year span, it skillfully reveals how Shepard's view of the world, his ideas regarding masculinity, and his perceptions of women have substantially changed. I was particularly impressed by the author's analyses of THE TOOTH OF CRIME, TRUE WEST, and A LIE OF THE MIND.

Seven drunk nurses are attacked by seven twelve year olds on customized Schwinns. A young man covers a nude female corpse with hundred dollar bills and plays Rolling Stones songs to her just before he burns her in the bathtub. A bored guitarist reaches orgasm with his Gibson. A traveler is tormented by a dead raven's feather. These and other stories and poetry make up playwright Sam Shepard's first foray into fiction and poetry (originally published in 1973). His major themes here include blood and violence, sex, love, and America. For any Shepard fan, this is a must-read. Shepard's images of America--the dry, flat desert, the endless highway, the seedy motel--are so dead-on that we are right there with his characters, looking over their shoulders as they commit sins and/or try to find some good in this world. Read it with Shepard's CRUISING PARADISE and MOTEL CHRONICLES.

Sam Shepard is one of the unheralded geniuses in American literature. This book, his first foray as far as I know into a 'scrap book' style of fiction, is beautiful, delicate, powerful, intimitely connected to the natural world and perhaps the world of spirits, as well as a pre-cursor to his future prose, poems and plays. If you wish to experience an America that has for the most part vanished for forever, an America that is rarely talked about in truth on our cable, radio, and internet, then pick up either this book, Motel Chronicles, or Cruising Paradise. All three are unique companion pieces, spread some twenty five years apart in publication, and well worth owning.

To me Shepard is saying that whether you are a pauper living in a hovel or a gentleman living on an estate, the cantankerous affects of life without morals will get you. All participants in the acts captured in the 'pictures' were ultimately victims.

However, describing this play exclusively as a moral treatise would be a moral outrage! This play is classic Shepard. The characters are edgy, the dialogue is light and quick, the setting desert western, and the plot is charged. Shepard's characters seemed to me to be at once unbelievable, and yet a little bit more like myself than I'd like to admit.

Sam Shepard's SIMPATICO is by far the best play ever written. Gripping dialogue, suspense, romance, intrigue, comic relief, deciet, lost love, and turmoil fill the pages of this play with unstoppable reading pleasure!

When Vinnie calls his best friend, Lyle, down to his down-and-out home in Cucumonga California, they start discussing a conflict which has been unresolved for over twenty years now. My favorite scene is when Rosie Carter, Lyle's wife and Vinnie's old girlfriend, comes in. She has the most important character, and her eleventh-hour performance is remarkable and simply powerful. Rosie is the tragic beauty that makes this play stand out.

About the movie SIMPATICO, possibly one of the best pictures of all time. Nick Nolte, Jeff Bridges, and Sharon Stone. Stone shines above all as the beautiful, tragic Rosie.

READ IT!

With this collection, Shepard demonstrates his remarkable ability to portray America in the realistic ways most contemporary authors/playwrights/poets are afraid to do. The dialogue is captivating and moving, and the action is fast-paced. Definetely an excellent buy.

THIS BOOK IS AN EXCELLENT LOOK BEHIND THE SCENES OF DYLAN'S ROLLING THUNDER REVIEW WHICH MADE IT'S WAY THROUGH NEW ENGLAND BACK IN THE FALL OF '75. SAM SHEPARD HAS DONE A GREAT JOB OF CAPTURING THE FEEL AND CHARACTERS THAT SURROUNDED THIS HISTORIC TOUR. NOT TO BE MISSED BY ANY TRUE DYLAN FAN.

This .pdf pamphlet is essential to understanding Shephard's 1979 Pulitzer award winning play. But DON'T read this until AFTER you have seen or read this tough play. I had thought that most of the characters might have been ghosts, none real except for Shelly and Vince - a couple stepping back in time into a fractured family's home. This short book completely explains each character and symbol. Just wonderful. BHH.

WOW! This book is absolutely electrifying. I was first turned on to Sam Shepard from reading "True West", one of his later amazing plays. As I read more and more I thought I had a good understanding of his writing: until I read this book. This book contains many of Shepard's earlier plays from the time he first landed in New York and, as his roommate Charles Mingus Jr. has said "Would go into a room with a ream of paper and come out two hours later with a finished play". If you have really enjoyed some of Shepard's later stuff, I definetly recommend this book to give you a fresh perspective on someone who literally turns "conventional theatre" upside down. If you are new to Shepard, you might want to tryhis later works first, only because they are easier to follow. These earlier works are very much like the "Beat generation"- throwing out speeches and sentences without punctuation, with tons of craziness happening on every inch of the stage. Sometimes the plays may be hard to follow, or confusing, but if you really "get" what Shepard is doing, you will love this book. Just be warned that all the plays are far from conventional theatre. If you are an "Our Town" type of person this isn't for you. If you enjoy Albee and Beckett, if you enjoy equal parts peace and chaos on stage, then check this book out.

Cruising Paradise is a lean muscular book. The writing is sometimes brutal and always powerful. His writing is reminiscent of Hemingway and Jim Harrison, but with a Southwestern flair and a stronger sense of immediacy. It is not the plots or so much the characters in the story that drive the book, but the sense of movement and restlessness in the stories peppered with stoicism that make his stories so interesting. His stories seem to be autobiographical, even those he clearly passes off as fiction. Recommended stories in the book are Nuevo Mundo, A Small Company of Friends, and Cruising Paradise. If you are sick of reading books that seemed contrived or cliche' give this one a look.

Through Cruising Paradise the voice of Sam Shepard kept me company during a week or two. I read his fragmented stories before falling asleep and felt at ease. I think it's the way he uses the language; lucid, clear, to the point, intense. The language flows and takes you to the images of endless roads, wide open spaces and the people who live there or just drive through it . You can feel the heat, you can hear the conversations, while all the time, in the back of your head Shepards voice leads you. He doesn't describe the situations in very much detail, he just lets the people talk, or think and that's enough. Wonderful experience. I believe it is the art of leaving out, to show what's there, in language and in imagery. Hope to find this again.

While reading this book, I had to stop more than a few times either to catch my breath or close my eyes and let what I just read sink in. I grew up down on the Mexican border, and Shepard's descriptions of events in that part of the world rang true, and were written in a terse manner, as is appropriate for the setting and characters. Brilliant.

One of my favorite collections of playwright-actor Sam Shepard (the others being CRUISING PARADISE and HAWK MOON). This is a collection of short stories, poetry, rants, observations, etc., from Shepard's own life. Each section is separated by date and city (though NOT in any particular order, as sections skip from the '70s to the '80s and back again to the '70s); my favorite is "9/24/80, San Francisco, Ca." (in my edition, pp. 43-46), a short story detailing a boy's train ride to his grandparents' home in Chicago, during which he meet a beautiful barefoot girl who looks like Tuesday Weld.

Some of the other stories in this collection formed the basis of Wim Wenders' 1984 film PARIS, TEXAS, which Shepard wrote, and which happens to be one of my all-time favorite films. MOTEL CHRONICLES would be a wonderful introduction to Sam Shepard; I highly recommend it to anyone who has ever wondered about the desert, the road, and America (the beautiful & the ugly).

Ok, you haven't read this? Order it. NOW. Your life is not complete without this book. Sam Shepard is, simply, one of the very best living writers, right next to Cormac McCarthy, friends. This is a boo full of dreams, memories, travel, chance, and ghosts. Each sotry-poem will stick with you, often returning tot he front of your mind when you least ecpect it. Go on, dig in.

I knew of Sam Shepard from seeing his acting in movies, and was aware of his plays. Deciding to read some of his work, I picked up Motel Chronicles and found it deeply moving. His writing is very calming and free...just straight-forward without artifice. This collection of poems, short stories, observations and vignettes was published in 1982 and reminds of simpler times and places--but with hard-edged realities (as Shepard offers reminiscences of his chilhood as well as his adult travels and experiences). Read this for its serenity and down to earth prose.