Spy of the First Person - Hardcover

"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 and the strength of my sons.' At last he has no choice but to accept the company of others as he travels through the great wide American somewhere."
--Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

"Haunting. . . . A testament-like fever dream of autofiction."
--Elisabeth Vincentelli, Newsday

"As the narrator's body grows weaker, his days are filled with trips to the clinic with loved ones, and a cascade of memories--orchards, surfers, the mid-1970s. He describes being 'exhausted from the chaos of this era'--'Napalm. Cambodia. Nixon. Tet Offensive. Watergate. Secretariat. Muhammad Ali.' . . . He has rendered the thoughtful, interior months of his own last act into spare and profound prose."
--Jane Ciabattari, BBC

"Powerful. . . . Ultimately, Shepard drops all pretense, closing out this collection with two heartbreaking chapters detailing his final days, and bringing the reader up close to what Rilke called 'undiluted death.'"
--John Winters, WBUR

--Kirkus Reviews (starred)

SAM SHEPARD was the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of more than fifty-five plays and three story collections. As an actor, he appeared in more than sixty 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. In 2012 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Trinity College, Dublin. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, received the Gold Medal for Drama from the Academy, and was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame. He died in 2017.