Day Out of Days
Stories
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- € 7,49
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- € 7,49
Beschrijving uitgever
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Actor and playwright Shepard strikes a world-weary note in his latest (after Great Dream of Heaven). Though billed as a short story collection, there are poems and narratives built solely on snippets of dialogue sprinkled throughout. It's all loosely connected by setting: most take place in forgotten western towns or along lonely stretches of highway. There is also a unifying tone of swagger that is satisfyingly reminiscent of Shepard's film characters and crackles with the dramatic tension one would expect from the celebrated playwright. Many of these pieces clock in at a page or less, and come across less as stories than as moments soliloquized by growly, first-person narrators. The brevity and intensity result in macabre overload, which, while initially disturbing, settles into the mundane as the bleakness becomes commonplace. It's best read in small doses, as, say, a disillusioned alternative to daily devotions.
