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  • Published: 3 December 2018
  • ISBN: 9780525563365
  • Imprint: Knopf US
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 96
  • RRP: $29.99

Spy Of The First Person



The final work from the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, actor, and musician: drawn from the author’s own experience with ALS, Spy of the First Person is borne of an artist’s desire to document what was happening to him.

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.

  • Published: 3 December 2018
  • ISBN: 9780525563365
  • Imprint: Knopf US
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 96
  • RRP: $29.99

About the author

Sam Shepard

Sam Shepard has written forty-five plays, twelve of which have won Obie Awards. In 1979 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Buried Child, and in 1984 he gained an Oscar nomination for his performance in The Right Stuff. His screenplay for Paris, Texas won the Golden Palm Award at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival, and he wrote and directed the film Far North in 1988. Other plays by Sam Shepard include Curse of the Starving Class, True West, Fool for Love and A Lie of the Mind. In 1986 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and in 1992 he received the Gold Medal for Drama from the Academy. In 2009 Shepard received the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award.

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