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Cruising Paradise: Tales
 
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Cruising Paradise: Tales [Paperback]

Sam Shepard (Author)
4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)

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Book Description

June 24, 1997
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, actor, ex-cowboy, and musician Sam Shepard now stands revealed as a storyteller of dazzling artistry. Bleak and wildly funny, touching but stringently unsentimental, these stories give readers a most intimate view of the writer who has become synonymous with the recklessness, stoicism, and solitude of American manhood.

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Cruising Paradise: Tales + Great Dream of Heaven: Stories + Day out of Days: Stories (Vintage)
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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Cruising Paradise contains 40 short stories by the renowned playwright and actor Sam Shepard. Exploring themes of solitude and loss, Shepard revisits the innocence of boyhood, traverses the confines of loneliness, gives accounts of the farcical exclusiveness of show business and offers an obstinate perspective on death. As in his stage and screen work, Shepard ties these musings to the wilds and open spaces of Mexico and the United States, utilizing the allure and tempo of the open road to bring his writing and self-actualization full circle. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Renowned playwright and actor Shepard (Buried Child, etc.) showcases his prose skills in this terse and wistful fiction debut, comprised of 40 short tales written between 1989 and 1995 and set mostly in remote reaches of the U.S. and Mexico. Stories of boyhood, lonely reminiscences, alienated accounts of showbiz absurdity and unsentimental looks at death and dying sketch a distinctive, rugged vision of manhood in America. In "Wild to the Wild," boys quarrel over the care of a mail-order wolf. In the title story, a young boy's drunken father burns to death, leaving behind a charred mattress in a cheap hotel. "More Urgent Emergencies" sees a man lose part of one finger while embracing his lover as she slices a watermelon. "Dust" takes an introspective wanderer through the Badlands of South Dakota on horseback with a beguiling half-Indian woman and her father. "The Package Man" recounts an older man's matter-of-fact suicide in a roadhouse restroom. "Homage to Celine," meanwhile, is one of several pieces following the experiences of movie actor Clayton Miles-who just wants to be left alone-as he works on a film to be shot in the Mexican jungle. As in his dramas, Shepard explores themes of solitude and loss, often tying them to the vast open spaces of America and to the siren song of its highways. And even as it plumbs shocking darkness, his writing here exhibits the gentleness and lyricism that has distinguished his acclaimed work for the stage.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

  • Paperback: 255 pages
  • Publisher: Vintage; 1st Vintage Books Ed edition (June 24, 1997)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0679742174
  • ISBN-13: 978-0679742173
  • Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.7 x 7.9 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #465,885 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Sam Shepard was born in 1943 in Fort Sheridan, Illinois. He moved to New York from California just as the off-Broadway theatre scene was emerging. He has written more than forty plays, of which elev en have won 'Obie' awards, besides collections of stories, prose writing and screenplays. His plays include Buried Child, The Late Henry Moss, Simpatico, Curse of the Starving Class, True West, Fool for Love, A Lie of the Mind, and States of Shock. His screenplay for Paris, Texas won the Golden Pa lm Award at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival and he directed his own screenplay, Far North, in 1988. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Shepard received the Gold Medal for Drama from the Academy in 1992, and in 1994 he was inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame.

 

Customer Reviews

9 Reviews
5 star:
 (8)
4 star:
 (1)
3 star:    (0)
2 star:    (0)
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Average Customer Review
4.9 out of 5 stars (9 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Experience art, May 28, 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: Cruising Paradise: Tales (Paperback)
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.
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant, April 5, 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: Cruising Paradise: Tales (Paperback)
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.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars A lean muscular book!, July 30, 2002
By 
Joseph V. Garza "toothofcrime" (los angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Cruising Paradise: Tales (Paperback)
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.
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