Great Dream of Heaven

In these 18 elegantly terse stories, Shepard taps the same wellsprings that have made him an acclaimed--and distinctly American--playwright: sex and regret, the yearning for a frontier, the comic gulf of misapprehension between men and women, and the even deeper gulf that separates men from their true selves. In eighteen stories unlike any in our contemporary literature, Sam Shepard explores the vast and rugged American West with the same parched intensity that has made him the great playwright of his generation (The New York Times). A boy watches a remedy man tame a wild stallion, a contest that mirrors his own struggle with his father.

A woman driving her mother's ashes across the country has a strangely transcendent run-in with an injured hawk. Two aging widowers, in Stetsons and bolo ties, together make a daily pilgrimage to the local Denny's, only to be divided by the attentions of their favorite waitress. Peering unblinkingly into the chasms that separate fathers and sons, husbands and wives, friends and strangers, these powerful tales bear the unmistakable signature of an American master.