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...

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....

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

...

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...

Premiered in San Francisco in 1980, True West is one of Sam Shepard’s funniest plays, as well as one of his most brutal. Austin is a stable, successful Hollywood screenwriter, Lee his menacing vagabond brother, and True West is the story of their attempt to trade lives. Their tragicomic quest to change identity ends in a stalemate, but along the way this Pulitzer Prize-winning author takes gleeful potshots at Hollywood, the myth of the frontier, and the escape fantasies that drive the American imagination. “By far the funniest, truest, and most mesmerizing play on Broadway.” — New York Daily News ...