Glimpses of Sam Shepard in 'Day Out of Days'

Images of severed heads recur throughout Sam Shepard's new collection of short stories, "Day Out of Days."

Several stories sprinkled throughout the collection deal with a man who finds a severed, talking head that asks to be carried to a nearby lake and thrown in.

Another story titled, "Timeline," is a list of dates followed by police-blotter occurrences of decapitations near the Mexican border.

A single-paragraph story titled, "These Recent Beheadings," bleakly states: "The body here, the head over there. And the mind desperately darting between them, trying to pull them back together."

Good luck.

There's an elegiac quality to many of the stories: Some are mere fragments, poems or just snippets of dialogue; all of them are helped along with a large dash of the kind of autobiographical detail that fairly begs the reader to ask: Who is Sam Shepard?

More specifically: Who is he now?

A kind of cowboy Samuel Beckett, the cerebral Irish playwright, Shepard got his start writing wildly experimental plays in tumultuous mid-'60s New York and went on to win the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for drama for "Buried Child."

But his matinee-idol good looks got him into movie roles, and he's probably better known now for acting and his marriage to Jessica Lange than for his literary endeavors.

The difference between the person Shepard feels himself to be and the person he appears to be might explain his fascination with heads disconnected from their bodies.

The same theme comes across less metaphorically in "Descendency," which finds an actor pondering why he, like Shepard (most recently in the 2009 movie "Brothers"), is always playing military men "which I'm not and which I'll never be."

In the opening story, "Kitchen," someone who may be a writer or a horse rancher sits in his kitchen looking at a picture of Beckett hung on the wall, not far from the business card of his horseshoer.

For Shepard fans, these stories tread the familiar ground of a romanticized, dystopian American West -- only now it has been updated for the cell phone era.

A cell phone plays a prominent role in "Land of the Living," the book's most fully realized story, which tells of a family vacation in the Yucatan overshadowed by accusations of an extramarital affair.

Aside from "Land of the Living," which appeared in The New Yorker magazine, the stories -- many of which have highway numbers as subtitles -- seem more like notes from the road.

While many of the stories hint at fascinating possibilities, few of them feel fully fleshed out, making for a less-than-satisfying read.

In "Costello," an aging actor returns incognito to his hometown and meets a man who remembers him from back when they took speed, stole cars and slept with Mexican prostitutes. Though the man suspects he's talking to his old friend, the actor never lets on.

The main character of "Indianapolis" runs into a woman he lived with in 1965 near New York's St. Mark's Church -- where Shepard's first two plays premiered -- and strains to remember anything about her, even her name.

There are pages of unadorned dialogue that obliquely reference "Waiting for Godot," and even stage directions for what might have been an early Shepard play.

The play features an extremely tall, thin and aging white man whose scrotum hang nearly to his knees. While the man shaves, his blue scrotum and white nose begin to blink and "keep blinking in the pitch black."

The final stage direction explains: "They blink incessantly until the audience has entirely cleared out."