Day Out of Days: Stories

From one of our most acclaimed writers: a collection of tales set mainly in 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. A wandering actor returns to his hometown and runs into an old friend, who recounts their teenage days of stealing cars, buying Benzedrine, and sleeping with whores in Tijuana. A Minnesota couple and their children, traveling south for vacation, are so caught up in the ordinary dramas of family life that they remain oblivious to the beauty of the Yucatan peninsula. Stunning, inventive, and powerful, these stories are Shepard at his flinty-eyed, unwavering best.

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.

Sam Shepard is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of more than forty-five plays. As an actor, he has appeared in more than thirty films, and received an Oscar nomination in 1984 for The Right Stuff. He was a finalist for the W. H. Smith Literary Award for his story collection Great Dream of Heaven. He lives in New York and Kentucky.