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Summary
Summary
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.
Author Notes
Sam Shepard was born Samuel Shepard Rogers III on an army base in Illinois on November 5, 1943. He briefly studied agriculture at Mount San Antonio College, but dropped out to move to New York in 1962. He wrote more than 55 plays during his lifetime. His first play was produced off-off-Broadway when he was 19 years old and he won the first of his 8 Obie Awards when he was 23 years old. His plays included Chicago, The Tooth of Crime, True West, Fool for Love, A Lie of the Mind, The Late Henry Moss, Heartless, and A Particle of Dread. He received the Pulitzer Prize for drama for Buried Child in 1978.
He was an actor for both film and television. His films included Days of Heaven, The Right Stuff, and Baby Boom. He also appeared in the Netflix series Bloodline. He wrote or co-wrote several screenplays including Far North and Renaldo and Clara with Bob Dylan. He also wrote songs with John Cale and Bob Dylan including Brownsville Girl. He wrote several books including Cruising Paradise and Motel Chronicles. He died from complications of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis on July 27, 2017 at the age of 73.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Actor and playwright Shepard strikes a world-weary note in his latest (after Great Dream of Heaven). Though billed as a short story collection, there are poems and narratives built solely on snippets of dialogue sprinkled throughout. It's all loosely connected by setting: most take place in forgotten western towns or along lonely stretches of highway. There is also a unifying tone of swagger that is satisfyingly reminiscent of Shepard's film characters and crackles with the dramatic tension one would expect from the celebrated playwright. Many of these pieces clock in at a page or less, and come across less as stories than as moments soliloquized by growly, first-person narrators. The brevity and intensity result in macabre overload, which, while initially disturbing, settles into the mundane as the bleakness becomes commonplace. It's best read in small doses, as, say, a disillusioned alternative to daily devotions. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Highways, rundown motels, Muzak-plagued franchises, bars, and beaches, snowstorms and blistering heat, these are the settings and circumstances in Shepard's hypnotic new book of entwined short stories. As in Cruising Paradise (1996) and Great Dream of Heaven (2004), strands of autobiography infuse Shepard's magnetic and beautifully tooled stories with their potent intimacy, wry humor, and tightrope tension. Shepard's central narrator is a restless man with a thousand-mile stare who prowls America's interstates and back roads with no particular purpose except to catch the buzz of forward motion through scrolling landscapes. As much as he roams, he can't escape his past, even as age plays havoc with his memories, and the ordinary collides with the inexplicable. A man comes across a severed head that speaks to him. A mercenary is annoyed over the terms of his latest assassination. Exploded meth labs, an abandoned church, traces of the Indian genocide, the horrors of Katrina, paeans to musicians--Shepard's acerbic and haunting stories and lyric yet piercing musings give voice to the longings and paradoxes of our days and nights as we try to follow the directive Shepard's harried traveler gives himself: Just stay between the lines. --Seaman, Donna Copyright 2009 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
For Sam Shepard, the prizewinning playwright and short-story writer (and sometime Hollywood actor) whose work might be characterized as Grass-Roots Gothic, infused as it is with a sense of folksy madness and populist brutality, the American landscape is a sprawling cemetery, a field of bad dreams spread out between two oceans. Its markers, commemorating acts of violence that seem to repeat themselves through the generations in a cruel infinity loop, consist of dark highways stretching to the horizon. Under them lies a dense matrix of remains. The bones of Plains Indians, Confederate soldiers, hard-luck homesteaders and hellhound drunks mix in a democratic necropolis capped by thousands of miles of oily blacktop. These routes, which for some writers promise liberation - an escape into unbounded freedom and possibility - are, for Shepard, roads of no return. Laid out north and south and east and west, they all lead in the same direction: down. In "Day Out of Days," his new collection of stories (many of them no longer than a few paragraphs and some of them styled as dialogues or poems), the anonymous narrator drives and drives, compulsively, logging the names of the towns he beds down in as though reciting a roll call of the dead. Williams, Arizona. Alpine, Texas. Valentine, Nebraska. Butte, Montana. They're the sort of forsaken, in-between locales where travelers don't usually stop except to buy gas or wolf down truck-stop breakfasts before moving on to bigger, brighter places, but Shepard's restless, red-eyed alter ego treats them as destinations, not just pit stops, abiding in them until they yield their secrets. Unlike Kerouac's seekers, his seeming models who blasted across the map in hot pursuit of long-lost comrades, hip diversions and rare epiphanies, the figure who's sometimes referred to as "the actor" (and who shares with his celebrated author certain biographical features like a parttime movie career and a passion for fast, expensive horses) isn't in much of hurry to get anywhere. He's fine with being nowhere. He prefers it. Escape isn't his goal. He craves perspective, a meditative immersion in deep particulars that allows him to access broader truths. In a Bossier City, La., motel whose rooms are crowded with Katrina refugees, he wraps his consciousness around the gears that endlessly generate manmade cataclysms. "You can see the trucks pouring back and forth from Dallas. You can hear the B-52 bombers big as small cities running low patterns all day long. Running circles from the local air base; practicing for Iraq, I guess. Practicing for some new catastrophe. . . . Big long ropes of black fuel trailing out across the sky, out past Louisiana Downs, across the greasy Red River where the big, glitzy casinos flash their neons bragging about jackpots and payouts and fun trips to the Bahamas, and nobody out here's got a pot to piss in. Nobody on this side of the river anyway." Shepard's narrator is an eagle-eyed introvert, part observer, part silent monologuist. He addresses himself like a stranger in the stories, reporting back on his encounters to a hidden, secondary self that he seems to be curiously removed from, even baffled by. He besieges this self with queries and accusations that seldom elicit a response. "What's going on? You're not going to last very long if you keep this up, you know. You'll burn yourself out. Can't you just follow some sort of itinerary, at least?" Hovering in his background, in his past, is an ill-defined series of missteps, the reader senses, that seem to stem from a long romance that has grown cold and, possibly, unsalvageable. He's also beset by the specter of a lost father: a raging, sadistic alcoholic cut down in a fatal hit-and-run whose habits are cropping up in Shepard's narrator. The clock of ruin is ticking deep inside him, tracking the revolutions of his odometer. He knows better than to believe he can outrun it, though. BREAKING the collection into acts is a series of surrealistic interludes in which Shepard's mobile man of mystery converses with a chatty severed head. The head seems to stand for his father's abiding influence, but also for the actual dismemberments that have come to dominate the news stories playing in the background of the travelogue, from the mayhem unleashed by amphetamine-crazed killers to the beheadings of captured G.I.'s by ruthless masked enemies in the war on terror. This war, as Shepard would have us understand it, is just the latest engagement in an old battle against the alleged foes of civilization that targeted the likes of Crazy Horse. The head, discovered in a filthy ditch, its eyes squeezed shut, its thoughts unknown, is a mocking, teasing entity. It demands to be heard and acknowledged by an America that all too easily buries its atrocities under roadside bronze-plaqued monuments that, all too often, go unheeded because we zoom past them at such high speeds, pursuing errands of little consequence. Shepard's fables of roadside parlays with gruesome demons and his reflections on our fraught geography are cut with more mundane realistic tales concerning the traveler's brushes with his own past, which he seems to be having trouble recollecting as he ages and his health declines. "Day Out of Days" is a tale of failing memory, on the personal level as well the collective, and the motive behind its hero's wanderings is to confront the chaos that's overcome him and, if possible, correct it. This turns out to be a tricky goal. In a snowbound Holiday Inn in Indianapolis, he bumps into an old lover who still seems fond of him. She offers him a sofa - the only one to be had for miles around - but he coolly begs off and sets off into the blizzard. Later, blinded by the storm, he turns back around, accepts his old flame's kindness, and finds himself reduced to tears by her pure, undiminished loyalty. But he's far too estranged and exhausted to respond, we sense. He'll wake up early, slip out and cruise away. He blows it again on a visit to his hometown. He's waylaid in a diner by an old partner in adolescent delinquency who recognizes him from his movie roles. Playing Judas to his younger self, he denies his own identity, ducking the sentimental moment. It's a perverse but profound American urge: to achieve solitude through perpetual motion. Descended from colonists who tamed the wilderness and one in a long line of tough-guy soldiers, Shepard's existential soloist can't shake his stoic attraction to isolation. Instead he finds companionship in ghosts - Kit Carson, Hank Williams, Woody Guthrie; lonesome, iconoclastic ramblers all - and he lives every day as though it were Memorial Day, quietly roaming the continental graveyard, seeking intimacy with the long gone. Occasionally he goes home to see his loved ones, but he can't abide their tiny concerns and flees. In the book's finest story, "Saving Fats," he loses himself in a stranger's far-fetched tale of the waterborne rescue of Fats Domino from a Katrina-swamped New Orleans slum. The tale is too outlandish to be convincing, but Shepard's character lets the lies sink in. He's come to see that fantasies beat facts - or rather, they are facts - in a land like ours. Fantasies organize experience in the manner of a good journey, while facts retard progress, pulling up short. Shepard's book has no normal beginning, middle and end. Its structure is not sequential but vertical. Using fanciful anecdotes, lyric riffs, seemingly lifelike reminiscences and quotes from our nation's founding thinkers, he drills down through the strata of our history into the bedrock of American myth. He sinks his wells at random, in offbeat spots, taking core samples from all over the country that often contain fossils of shared experience, some of them heavily crusted over with legend. His words have a flinty, mineral integrity, especially when he describes the people around him, who come off as distinctive individuals but also have an enduring archetypal feel, like the iconic figures in Whitman poems. His crackpot vagabonds, working-class survivors and footloose fellow wanderers have been with us always and probably always will be. Their names may change over time but not their souls, which eventually form the ground we're forced to cover us as we fan out to seek our fates. But their moans are still audible over our engine noise - if we only slow down enough to hear them in the way that Shepard does. 'You can see the trucks pouring back and forth from Dallas. You can hear the B-52 bombers big as small cities.' Walter Kirn is a regular contributor to the Book Review and the author, most recently, of "Lost in the Meritocracy," a memoir. His 2001 novel "Up in the Air" is the basis for the current film of the same name.
Kirkus Review
A table of contents listing 133 (count 'em) entries may tempt readers to dismiss this new collection from Shepard (Great Dream of Heaven, 2002, etc.) as a literary grab bag; they will be richly surprised by its thematic depth and coherence. A quick browse suggests a mix of travelogue, dialogue (unattributed to any speakers), free verse, tall tales, stage directions, journal jottings, dreams and writing that resists categorization. Yet rather than a busman's holiday for the Pulitzer Prizewinning playwright (Buried Child, etc.) and Oscar-nominated actor (The Right Stuff, etc.), this volume offers a profound meditation on mortality, identity, eternity, blood ties, the passage of time, the essence of America, the mythos of the West and the possibilities of art. It demands to be read in order and in its entirety: Juxtapositions offer thematic links, and narratives that initially appear self-contained resume multiple times over the course of the collection. One of those narratives concerns a severed head that retains consciousness and speech and somehow convinces a passing man to carry him (it?) elsewhere. Another features three buddies whose lives have devolved into traveling from place to place for no apparent purpose. "We're all in terrible shape," says the narrator. "I don't know how we got this way." First-person narration dominates, some of it apparently representing the voice of the author, some of it obviously not. In one of Shepard's more arresting images, "You circle all around your life, but do you find it? You circle from above. Like a hawk." Older rarely means wiser in these pages filled with vagabonds who aren't sure what they're looking for, where they're looking for it or why. They circle back to homes that no longer exist, at least not the way they did in memory. They are "lost souls wandering in the desert," but they can never quite lose themselves. Echoes and resonances across the selections intensify the cumulative impact. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
The pieces in this collection are called stories, but many are more like fragments. There are poems, dialogs, and miscellaneous items of varying length, from a few lines to several pages, each separately titled. As the reader is drawn in, motifs recur, and themes begin to emerge. Some pieces revolve around a trio of men in varying stages of intoxication traveling aimlessly from place to place, trying to get in touch with someone. Journeys are a major concern, as many of the stories feature solitary travelers or groups going on vacation, waiting in airports, trying to check into motel rooms, or driving through blizzards accompanied by familiar tunes on the radio. There is also the recurring story of a hit man and his occasional musings on the meaning of life and his profession. Stranger still and possibly related, a bodyless head hails a man from the side of the road and starts a conversation. Verdict This varied and fragmentary collection does add up to a worthwhile literary endeavor. Shepard's gritty and humorous prose style is perfectly suited to the material. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 9/1/09.]-Jim Coan, SUNY Coll. at Oneonta (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Kitchen I've always done my best work in the kitchen. I don't know why. Cooking stuff up. Maybe that's it. Now I've got my own kitchen deep in the country with a big round table smack in the middle. But I am surrounded. I'm not sure who put all this stuff in here. Who jumbled all this up on my white brick walls as though it told some story, made some sense; some whole world out of floating fractured bits and pieces. Pencil drawing of Seattle Slew, long after retirement--bloated pasture-belly, glazed far-off stare in his eye as though looking back to the glory days of the Triple Crown. And, wedged between the glass and flat black frame, 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. Postcards of nineteenth-century Lakota warriors like Gaul, adopted son of Sitting Bull, price on his head; left for dead only to come back and seek his perfect vengeance at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Henry Miller with a walking stick, black beret, sitting on a rock wall gesticulating to the camera, some quote about morality and why don't we just give ourselves over completely and unabashedly to the present, since we're all up against the same grim prospect anyway; same sinking ship. Slaves in sepia tone, harvesting bluegrass seed and whistling "Dixie." Wedged between the tile and brick, more pix of hawks and galloping horses out near where we used to chase skinny coyotes back into the tangled mesquite and ocotillo. Then Beckett's sorrowful bespectacled hawk-face, gazing into oblivion with no trace of self-pity, resigned, hands clasped between his knees. Underneath in neat black scrawl: "There is no return game between a man and his stars." Who scrambled all this stuff in here with no seeming regard for associative order, shape, or color? Without the slightest care for where it might all wind up. Just randomly pinned to cupboards and door frames, slipping sideways; gathering spotted stove grease and fly shit. El Santuario de Chimayó, for instance, caked in Christmas snow, but what's it doing right next door to a business card for my horseshoer with an anvil and hammer logo? Then, working up the wall, there's the little bay in Lubec, Maine, where another set of rum-running ancestors lay long buried, then magic stones from Bernalillo, Wounded Knee, the painted stick, guts of the dream catcher, antelope, prairie dog, old speckled racing greyhounds flying off the tailgates; rusted spurs on the back of the black walnut door. What's all this shit for? Some display for who? For me? What for? Some guest or other? I have no guests. You know that. I'm no host. Never have been. Maybe the old Sonoran man who drops off split oak but no real visitors, that's for sure. Everyone knows to stay far away. Especially now with the tiger-brindled pit bull out front. The screaming burro kicking buckets down the hill. The fighting gallo in attack mode. I'm in this bunker all my own, surrounded by mysterious stuff. It may be time to take a break and walk back out into the dripping black woods where I know the hollowed-out Grandaddy Sycamore sits and waits for you to climb inside and breathe up into its bone-white aching arms. Haskell, Arkansas (Highway 70) Sunday, midday. Not many cars. Man's out for a stroll. He comes across a head in a ditch by the side of the road; walks right past it, thinking he hasn't seen what he's just seen; thinking it's not possible. He stops. His heart starts picking up a little. His breath gets choppy. He's shaking now and he's never understood why his body always takes over in moments of panic like this; why his body refuses to listen to his head. He turns and goes back. He stops again and stares down i Excerpted from Day Out of Days by Sam Shepard All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
