The Good Shepard

In baseball lingo, Sam Shepard is at least a four-tool talent—writer, playwright, screenwriter (Paris, Texas), and actor. As an actor Shepard has made valuable contributions to some memorable films (Days of Heaven, The Right Stuff), and he has written over 40 plays (The God of Hell,Buried Child), many winning awards including one Pulitzer Prize. Add to his bibliography two prose anthologies (Motel Chronicles and Hawk Moon), and with his new book, Day out of Days (Knopf), three short-fiction collections.

Much of the landscape for these stories (there are 133 short tales, dialogues, vignettes, lyrics, and fragments woven together) is the American West of Shepard’s imagination—a terrain of empty spaces and drifters and strange places. A man is trapped overnight in a fast food place having to listen endlessly to Shania Twain songs on the sound system; if you find that funny (and horrific at the same time, as I do), that’s Shepard’s perverse sense of humor in evidence as it is through this compendium. Which includes the recurrence of a talking severed head in a wicker basket that gets another character (an unnamed man) to do his bidding, as in “Haskell, Arkansas
(Highway 70)”: