Spy of the First Person

Author: Shepard, Sam

Brand: VINTAGE

Color: White

Edition: Reprint

Binding: paperback

Number Of Pages: 96

Release Date: 20-11-2018

Part Number: 9780525563365

Details: Product Description
The final work from the Pulitzer Prize–winning writer, actor, and musician, drawn from his transformative last days
 
In searing, beautiful prose, Sam Shepard’s extraordinary narrative leaps off the page with its immediacy and power. It tells in a brilliant braid of voices the story of an unnamed narrator who traces, before our rapt eyes, his memories of work, adventure, and travel as he undergoes medical tests and treatments for a condition that is rendering him more and more dependent on the loved ones who are caring for him. The narrator’s memories and preoccupations often echo those of our current moment—for here are stories of immigration and community, inclusion and exclusion, suspicion and trust. But at the book’s core, and his, is family—his relationships with those he loved, and with the natural world around him. Vivid, haunting, and deeply moving,
Spy of the First Person takes us from the sculpted gardens of a renowned clinic in Arizona to the blue waters surrounding Alcatraz, from a New Mexico border town to a condemned building on New York City’s Avenue C. It is an unflinching expression of the vulnerabilities that make us human—and an unbound celebration of family and life.
Review
“Sam Shepard's 
Spy of the First Person is a devastating work that is also full of life and wonder. From its heartbreaking dedication to 
him by his children to its last longing and truthful pages, it is an intimate masterwork.”
—Michael Ondaatje, Booker Prize–winning author of 
The English Patient 

“Moving. . . . Sly and revealing. . . . This novel’s themes are 
echt Shepard: fathers and sons; shifting identities and competing versions of reality; a sense that there are watchers and there are watchees in this world of dusty gravitas. . . . You can tell you are moving into the realm of myth when you are holding a slender novel like this one that has large type and ample margins, to give the words room to reverberate. . . . There are echoes of Beckett in this novel’s abstemious style and existential echoes.”
—Dwight Garner,
The New York Times
 
“Eloquent. . . . Its effect is one of atmosphere rather than narrative, an aching requiem sung in the shadow of extinction. . . . Shepard’s gaunt lyricism conjures an album of bleached images in which the life of a man and the changing face of a country are cataloged with both love and bafflement. . . . A lived richness burnishes each page. . . . It is difficult not to be moved by these sparks of beauty and belonging. They light up all the brighter for how quickly they go dark.”
—Dustin Illingworth,
Los Angeles Times

“Beautiful . . . Cryptic, almost hallucinatory. . . . Remarkable. . . . There’s a subtle curiosity at work, too, the curiosity of a writer to the very end. Unsettling, yet brave.”
—Jocelyn McClurg,
USA Today

“In
Spy of the First Person, two narrative voices wind together in beguiling fashion. . . .
Spy of the First Person returns to the uncanny experience evoked in all of Shepard’s fiction of being both the observer and the observed. . . . Shepard has always been a spare and oblique writer, creating a sense of dreamy discomfort. . . . The sketches jump to northern California, the Alcatraz prison, a doctor’s office in Arizona and even the squats of the Lower East Side in the 1970s. But as always, the itinerancy masks a profound feeling of imprisonment, as the scenes inevitably circle back to the old man on the porch, who has been rendered so immobile that he has to ask for help to scratch an itch on his face. Yet that appeal for help marks a small but significant change. Shepard’s wanderers have usually been on unaccompanied journeys with no departure or destination, only an ever-repeating present instant. But
Spy of the First Person ends with a scene of family solidarity. The old man watches himself being pushed in a wheelchair to a crowded Mexican restaurant. . . . ‘The thing I remember most,’ he thinks, ‘is being more or less helpless a

EAN: 9780525563365

Package Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.1 x 0.4 inches

Languages: English