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Mar 03, 2017 Web Exclusive By Frank Valish

Sam Shepard has written more than 55 plays, as well as 3 collections of stories. He has acted I more than 60 films, receiving an Oscar nomination for 1984’s The Right Stuff. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1979 play Buried Child. For his most recent book, The One Inside, Shepard creates a world of memories, his story telling of a life rendered in disparate and dissociated recollections, dreams, hallucinations, conversations, and scenes set within vivid nature imagery. Like a play of sorts, The One Inside is set in scenes, short bursts of nonlinear text, written in both poetry and prose, that in total tell the story of a man stuck in romantic entanglements with both a younger woman and a girl with whom his father was having an illicit relationship when he was a boy. But rather than focusing on any salacious element of these relationships, The One Inside instead becomes a treatise on how our memories shape how we define our lives, what we remember, why, and how, through these, a life is made full. At times beguiling and always engaging, The One Inside is a book worthy of deep thought. (www.penguinrandomhouse.com)

Author rating: 7/10