True West

November 1, 2022

With Bruno Schulz, the Sami Rohr Prize--winning Balint revisits the celebrated Polish Jewish author/artist, focusing on the rediscovery of murals Schulz was compelled to paint at an SS villa and the question raised when they were smuggled to Jerusalem: who can claim the legacy of those, like Schulz, who perished in the Holocaust? Actor, stand-up comedian, and significant MTV player since its inception, Bellamy talks about quitting his corporate job and smashing race and class barriers as he rose to Top Billin' in the entertainment industry (100,000-copy first printing). An expansion of New York Times best-selling memoirist Dederer's viral Paris Review essay, "What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?" Monsters considers whether genius gives male artists from Polanski to Picasso the license for malicious behavior and whether male and female monstrosity are the same (35,000-copy first printing). With Honey, Baby, Mine, celebrated actress Dern and her equally celebrated mother Ladd share intimate conversations they've had, sparked by Ladd's illness (500,000-copy first printing). After his divorce, Mississippi novelist Durkee sneaked off to a fishing shack in Vermont and started Stalking Shakespeare, facing down know-it-all curators as he looked for a portrait of the Bard that could verifiably be shown to have been painted from life. A novelist, playwright, and biographer of Jerry Garcia and Timothy Leary, Greenfield takes a long look at multi-Obie-winning playwright, actor, and director Sam Shepard in True West (40,000-copy first printing). An esteemed dance critic who wrote for the Village Voice for over four decades, Jowitt limns the life and works of groundbreaking modern dance choreographer Martha Graham in the smartly named Errand into the Maze; it's the title of one of Graham's best-known pieces (20,000-copy first printing). Prize-winning poet Schoenberger, also author of Dangerous Muse: The Life of Lady Caroline Blackwood, does a deep dive into the character of Tennessee Williams's iconic Blanche from A Streetcar Named Desire (40,000-copy first printing). In Nothing Stays Put, Wall Street Journal contributor Spiegelman unearths the life of Amy Clampitt, a celebrated poet (and personal favorite) who published her first of five acclaimed collections when she was 63 and went on to win a MacArthur fellowship.

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 27, 2023
Greenfield (Mother American Night), a former Rolling Stone editor, delivers a riveting account of the life of playwright and actor Sam Shepard (1943–2017). Shepard, Greenfield suggests, was as a tortured soul who led a charmed life and had a knack for landing in the right place at the right time, starting with Greenwich Village in the early 1960s. The burgeoning writer remained “immune to... the social and political turbulence” of the countercultural ’60s, but was ready for its sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, carving a niche as an experimental playwright and occasional rock drummer. Shepard’s ascent in the New York theater world connected him with acting roles in Hollywood that helped fund his writing and led to a long-term relationship with actor Jessica Lange. Greenfield notes that even as Shepard garnered accolades for his plays and acting, he was tormented by his fraught relationship with his domineering, alcoholic father, a relationship that inspired the unhappy families in his plays. Greenfield doesn’t shy away from the less savory aspects of Shepard’s character, such as the marginalization of women in his work, and the keen attention to Shepard’s psychology makes for an illuminating portrait of a larger-than-life figure. Few readers will leave being unimpressed with Shepard, or this biography.

Starred review from March 1, 2023
A fresh biography of the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, actor, director, and screenwriter. In Sam Shepard's (1943-2017) world, everything is fodder to be twisted into one of his stories--including facts. In this fascinating biography of the larger-than-life theater legend, however, the focus is on keeping the facts straight, which is no small feat. Greenfield, a veteran music writer known for his biographies of the Rolling Stones, Jerry Garcia, and Timothy Leary, masterfully lets Shepard maintain his mythmaking, including his troubled childhood and run-ins with the law, but he balances it with outside corroboration. After he was arrested for DUI in Normal, Illinois, Shepard told the judge he got drunk with helicopter pilots involved in the conflict in Somalia captured in the movie Blackhawk Down, which included Shepard. He hoped he would receive a lighter sentence because of the military connection, but Greenfield writes that the sentence of two years of court supervision and suspended license "would most likely have happened even if he had not elected to commit perjury on the stand." That kind of fact-finding serves readers well, whether they are interested in Shepard's off-off-Broadway beginnings, his artistic process in celebrated works like Fool for Love, Buried Child, and True West, or his relationships with Patti Smith and Jessica Lange. Writing about the connection between Shepard and Smith, the author observes, "Completely at ease with one another, they seem to vibrate at an even higher frequency together than either of them could attain on their own." Greenfield also injects useful real-world issues into the Shepard artistic myth, including how he took movie-acting roles to make money and would sell his letters and other personal papers to avoid debt. Impressively, the author accomplishes his biographical investigation without diminishing Shepard's legacy as one of America's greatest playwrights. A masterful look at the wild life of an enigmatic artist that shows how captivating the truth can be.

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Starred review from April 1, 2023
The nexus between playwright, actor, and fiction writer Sam Shepard's life and art is intricate. His dozens of radical, unnerving, wildly imaginative, raging, sorrowful, and mordantly funny plays and stories are spiked with family trauma, autobiography, and mythologizing. Previous biographies have tracked this dynamic, but seasoned biographer Greenfield is the first to fully chronicle Shepard's entire, tempestuous, endlessly creative life from joining the 4-H Club in Southern California to arriving in New York City as a penniless college dropout in 1963 to attaining international acclaim to his heroic battle with ALS and death in 2017. Greenfield traces the indelible mark Shepard's father's fall from glory as a WWII fighter pilot to a down-and-out alcoholic left on the artist as he avidly chronicles each of Shepard's audacious and powerfully reverberating plays and their contentious productions, from off-off-Broadway to San Francisco's Magic Theatre and the stages of London. Drawing on extensive archives and conducting relevatory interviews, Greenfield tracks the influence of rock 'n' roll on Shepard's writing, the interplay between his plays and films, his notoriety, passion for horses, persistent solo cross-country drives, sustaining friendship with Johnny Dark, and great loves: O-Lan Jones, Patti Smith, and Jessica Lange. Sardonic, haunted, brilliant, and elusive, Shepard needed to be free and loved, while his dramatic quest was at once personal, reflective of the times, and steeped in humankind's ceaseless paradoxes.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.