Great Dream of Heaven: Stories [Paperback]

Sam Shepard (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 11, 2003

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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In his second collection of short fiction, Great Dream of Heaven, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Sam Shepard offers a resonant examination of interpersonal crisis and revelation in 18 lean tales. At times humorous, tense, and tragic, these stories often focus on the elusive search for connection and understanding, visiting characters at key moments of consciousness or detachment. Seized by compulsion or repression, many in this work disengage from life by assuming familiar roles or patterns. In "The Stout of Heart," a man obsessed with horse breeding locks himself in his room annually to study catalogues, shutting out his family, while in "An Unfair Question," another man's frustration with his role as husband and father surfaces when he engages a party guest in friendly conversation and ends up holding her at gunpoint. These stories achieve an understated impact due in part to Shepard's knack for acute dialogue and descriptions that reveal his dramatist's eye for sparse but evocative detail. In "Living the Sign," a handmade sign in a fast food restaurant inspires a man to self-awareness, though he finds that its teenage creator is only dimly aware of its significance. "The Remedy Man," the collection's first and strongest story, tells of a guarded boy who comes to realize his potential by helping E.V., the road-worn title character (a fixer of bad horses), break a stallion. "Horse is just like a human being," E.V. tells him. "He's just gotta know his limits. Once he finds that out he's a happy camper." Offering many such moments of distilled wisdom, the stories in Great Dream of Heaven are no less brief but memorable encounters. --Ross Doll --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

"E.V. made no bones about it; he was not a horse whisperer by any stretch," writes Shepard (Cruising Paradise, etc.) in the first of 18 brief stories that make up his new collection. "He could fix bad horses, and when he fixed them they stayed fixed." This terse, weather-beaten "remedy man" turns out to be so observant that he gives a bullied boy a new sense of the truly vast scale of life and of his own possibilities. Some of the tales explore how characters fail to connect with any greater vision. Ambushed by sex, buried in habit or gripped by a desperation they didn't know they possessed, they become like blind forces of nature, some of them terrifying and heartbreaking. At his best, Shepard shows us how in brief, bright moments people wake up from the suck and drag of the distractions that cloud their lives. In "Living the Sign" a young fast-food worker commemorates his moment of lucidity by posting a sign that reads, "`Life is what's happening to you while you're making plans for something else.'" Shepard shows that consciousness calls out to us: eager to track down the employee who made the sign, a patron asks if anyone there seems "particularly auspicious? Particularly present and attentive?" In classic Shepard style, he also shows in the title story how people can fall apart as quickly and with just as much force as they come together. Like "The Remedy Man" himself, these sketches are simple but deeply intuitive and true.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (November 11, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375704523
• ISBN-13: 978-0375704529
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.4 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #166,465 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

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars In These Slim Pages....................., April 6, 2003

By 

Joseph J. Hanssen "Joe" (Upstate New York) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Great Dream of Heaven: Stories (Hardcover)

Shepard, the well-known playwright and actor, has written eighteen brief stories that are filled with unforgettable images. They deal with the unexpected reactions of human nature, especially sex and the yearnings for things that no longer exist. Shepard is at his best with these stories as he clearly and effortless describes the sorrows, joys, and fallibility of everyday life.

I enjoyed all of Shepards stories in his second collection of fiction. It would be hard to choose any one favorite, but Blinking Eye is one I will never forget. It will leave an unforgettable image on your mind. It is about a young girl driving cross-country bearing an urn containing her mothers ashes when she encounters an injured hawk on the side of the road. She decides to take the injured hawk to a veterinarian for help. What happens after she places the hawk in her car will definitely leave a vivid image in your mind forever.

Shepards gift of writing is effortless to read for he brings all of his stories to life in a clear, concise, and beautifully detailed matter. This is a book not to be missed!!

Joe Hanssen

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sam's way . . ., July 8, 2006

By 

Ronald Scheer "rockysquirrel" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Great Dream of Heaven: Stories (Paperback)

Fans of playwright Sam Shepard will enjoy this collection of short pieces, many of them not more than monologues or brief sketches of dialogue. Sometimes the blanks are filled in and we get an actual short story, as in the title story, about two elderly men who compete for the attention of a waitress at Denny's. Also, "An Unfair Question," in which an over-inquisitive party guest interested in guns is taken to the basement by her host, who becomes dangerously impatient with her.

Others tend toward a Mamet-like fascination with the way people talk who have little to say and don't listen to each other. In "Living the Sign," a fast-food customer tries unsuccessfuly to strike up a conversation with the young employees about a thoughtful message hung over the chicken wings. A father and his two school-age children, in "Berlin Wall Piece," struggles without much success - or gratitude - to help his son with a homework assignment. Two telephone conversations comprise the extent of "Coalinga 1/2 Way," in which one person attempts vainly to keep the other person from walking out of a relationship. Four voice mail messages comprise another, as a shady character reports to a client on the fate of an injured race horse in "Tinnitus."

Two personal favorites are "The Remedy Man," about a man who breaks a willful horse, as well as the tyrannical hold of a father over his son, and the monologue "The Company's Interest," in which a lone night-shift filling station attendant is confronted by two long haired, tatooed and much overweight customers.

Mostly set in the West, many in California, this collection of stories shows flashes of mercurial creative intelligence sending off sparks of story fragments - characters, situations, dialogue, each elusive and elliptical, verbal fireworks against a night sky, your imagination filled with evocative afterimages. BTW, the cover photo is by Jessica Lange.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars No ordinary Heaven., October 26, 2002

By 

G. Merritt (Boulder, CO) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Great Dream of Heaven: Stories (Hardcover)

Readers should not approach Shepard's book with expectations of reading traditional short stories. Rather, in this collection of eighteen condensed fictions, Pulitzer-Prize winning playwright and Oscar-nominated actor, Sam Shepard shows us a dreamlike country populated with troubled cowboys, fast-food workers, suburban gun owners, and lonely gas station employees. And he doesn't waste words. While some pieces of Shepard's HEAVEN shine brighter than others (like the title story of two old friends driven apart by a Denny's waitress and the collection's first story, "Remedy Man," about a fixer of bad horses), all of them offer up truths as real as earthly dirt. He has it as an actor. He has it as a playwright. And with this collection, Sam Shepard proves that he has the right stuff as a fiction writer.

G. Merritt