Battling against Castro - Tapa dura

Ranging from winter-league baseball in prerevolutionary Cuba to a postapocalyptic frontier in the American South, from the set of Murnau's classic horror film Nosferatu to more familiar (if no less inventive) scenes of family life, these fourteen stories - some comic, others compassionate, every one enthralling - span an immense fictional landscape with great verve and humanity, humor and wisdom. And Shepard's richly diverse characters - the boy who locks himself inside his Catholic school in a vague protest against injustices he can neither comprehend nor cope with, the father whose reckless fixation ultimately threatens the children he so loves, the postdoctoral fellow whose obsessive study of volcanoes mirrors his futile attempts to understand his brother's explosive psyche, the fighter pilot who considers pulling eight g's as "the real thing, the difference between thinking about kissing and kissing" - combine the ordinary, the bizarre, and the heroic to stunning effect.

st collection of stories--some comic, others compassionate, all of them enthralling--Shepard again displays his prodigious writing talent. Ranging from winter-league baseball in pre-revolutionary Cuba to a postapocalyptic frontier in the American South, from the set of Murnau's classic horror film Nosferatu to more familiar scenes of family life, these 14 stories span an immense fictional landscape with great verve and humanity.