GOOD DAYS Sam Shepard (pictured here with his Hermes typewriter, in New York City) has a new story collection out this month.

For a laconic splinter whose platinum presence suggests a merger of Samuel Beckett and Gary Cooper (those two craggy minimalists of parched utterance), Sam Shepard has sure slung a lot of words around in his long, unruly career. From the resonant cavity of his literary voice has come a locust army: more than 45 plays (among them True West, Curse of the Starving Class, and The Tooth of Crime), numerous screenplays (including Paris, Texas), and a pair of nonfiction entries (one of them a diary of Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder tour, that runny-clown-paint masquerade), and none of them pecked out on a dinky netbook neither, but on a manly typewriter. Now the latest addition to the Shepard library—Day out of Days, which the publisher (Knopf) calls "a new collection of short fiction," and they do mean short. Some of the chapters are only a page long; others consist of a single tombstone paragraph. But the cumulative effect is expansive, panoramic. Like Bob Dylan, Shepard is a geographer of the rawboned surrealism of America's shadow interior, story after story bearing the name of a town or highway, our national portrait dabbed with a thousand points of darkness.