Great Dream of Heaven: Stories

Sam Shepard, a world-renowned playwright, is also an excellent short story author. His collection, Great Dream of Heaven, is innovative, refreshing, fast moving, and brilliant. I found myself reading some of the stories out loud to my friends and family. Great Dream of Heaven is a must read.

"Life is what's happening to you while you're making plans for something else." That one sentence from "Living the Sign", sums up this entire collection of simple stories that really hit the nail on the head. The story itself is a metaphor for the collection: The sentence is posted on a sign in a fast food joint by one of its employees, and the sign prompts one customer to begin a mini journey of discovery to find the one prescient individual among the glassy-eyed help behind the counter. In "The Remedy Man" we get a simple take on the proverbial Horse Whisperer (though E.V., the title character wouldn't classify himself as such - hence the title - he fixes things). But, is this the story of E.V. fixing a horse, or that of him helping a young boy find his own strength and way under the thumb of his controlling father? The characters in these stories, whether a man unable to grasp his role as father and husband who takes another partygoer hostage at gun point or so obsessed with horse breeding that he locks himself away from his family annually to study catalogs, are either at moments of absolute clarity or complete detachment from life. And, Shepard's sharp, concise dialog and writing snaps right to the point every time. >>>>>>><<<<<<< <br /> <br />A Guide to my Book Rating System: <br /> <br />1 star = The wood pulp would have been better utilized as toilet paper. <br />2 stars = Don't bother, clean your bathroom instead. <br />3 stars = Wasn't a waste of time, but it was time wasted. <br />4 stars = Good book, but not life altering. <br />5 stars = This book changed my world in at least some small way.

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.

Shepard has thrown away everything not absolutely necessary to get at the core of what matters.Each story in this slim volume gets to the center of a facet of life and illuminates it.Though every tale is stripped to essentials each is true to life. Perfect reading for a Sunday afternoon.Highly recommended.

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