Barry Gifford is an American author whose work is celebrated for its distinctive blend of American landscapes and literary madness, influenced by film noir and the Beat Generation. His prose is often characterized by a unique, dark humor, exploring the fringes of American life. Gifford is known for his narratives featuring unconventional protagonists on the road, many of which have been adapted into films, highlighting his strong visual storytelling. He also has an extensive body of non-fiction work.
Exploring themes of race, religion, and politics, this collection features excerpts from all thirteen of Barry Gifford's novels and novellas, alongside essays, poetry, journalism, and a new interview. The work presents an episodic view of Gifford's distinctive human comedy, showcasing a cast of eccentric characters and bizarre events. Lula, a central figure, encapsulates the essence of this world as "wild at heart and weird on top," offering readers a glimpse into the author's unique narrative style and perspective.
Anecdotal reflections shape this collection, offering insights into Barry Gifford's experiences as a writer. Divided into three sections—books, film and television, and music—it showcases his best work, including an in-depth nine-part analysis of Marlon Brando's One-Eyed Jacks. Gifford explores the intertwining of public and private lives of the film's figures, presenting a unique perspective on the movie's narrative and impact. This revised edition captures the essence of Gifford's literary contributions across various mediums.
Exploring the aftermath of loss, these three plays delve into the complex dynamics of grief within families. "Tricks" examines the psychological depths of two men seeking connection beyond physical intimacy, hinting at fractured identities. "Blackout" portrays a 1930s couple, Danny and Diane, trapped in their sorrow over a child's death, with Diane retreating into delusions. In "Mrs. Kashfi," a young boy encounters a haunting presence while his mother seeks solace through clairvoyance, highlighting the eerie intersections of life and death.
Set against the backdrop of postwar Chicago, the narrative follows Roy, a young man grappling with the absence of a father while navigating a tumultuous world filled with violence and poverty. Through a blend of memoir and fiction, the collection of forty-one short stories captures Roy's journey of self-discovery amid a cast of vivid characters, including charlatans and dreamers. The stories explore themes of adventure, imagination, and the harsh realities of growing up, revealing the complexities of adolescence and the bittersweet nature of life.
Known for his contributions to the American neo-noir genre, Barry Gifford's body of work spans novels, stories, poetry, and films over four decades. His writing captures the essence of life's cruelty, horror, and banality with striking brevity, as noted by The New York Times Book Review. Gifford's gritty tales delve into the darker aspects of American life, showcasing his unique ability to convey complex emotions and themes with simplicity and depth.
"A fascinating literary and historical document, the most insightful look at the Beat Generation." —Dan Wakefield, author of New York in the Fifties and Going All the Way First published in 1978, Jack's Book gives us an intimate look into the life and times of the "King of the Beats." Through the words of the close friends, lovers, artists, and drinking buddies who survived him, writers Barry Gifford and Lawrence Lee recount Jack Kerouac's story, from his childhood in Lowell, Massachusetts, to his tragic end in Florida at the age of forty-seven. Including anecdotes from an eclectic list of well-known figures such as Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Gore Vidal, as well as Kerouac's ordinary acquaintances, this groundbreaking oral biography—the first of its kind—presents us with a remarkably insightful portrait of an American legend and the spirit of a generation.
"Roy tells it the way he sees it, shuttled between Chicago to Key West and Tampa, Havana and Jackson MS, usually with his mother Kitty, often in the company of lip-sticked women and fast men. Roy is the muse of Gifford's hardboiled style, a precocious child, watching the grown-ups try hard to save themselves, only to screw up again and again. He takes it all in, every waft of perfume and cigar smoke, every missed opportunity to do the right thing. And then there are the good things too. A fishing trip with Uncle Buck, a mother's love, advice from Rudy, Roy's father: "Roy means king. Be the king of your own country. Don't depend on anyone to do your thinking for you." The stories in The Boy Who Ran Away to Sea are together a love letter and a tribute to the childhood experiences that ground a life"-- Provided by publisher
Based on historical events in 1851, this Western noir novella traces the struggle of the first integrated Native American tribe to establish themselves on the North American continent. After escaping the Oklahoma relocation camps they had been placed in following their forced evacuation from Florida, the Seminole Indians banded with fugitive slaves from the American South to fulfill the vision of their leader, Coyote, to establish their land in Mexico's Nacimiento. The Mexican government allowed them initially to settle in Mexico near the Texas-Mexico border, in exchange for guarding nearby villages from bands of raiding Comanches and Apaches. On the Texas side of the border, a romance begins between Teresa, daughter of former Texas Ranger and slavehunter Cass Dupuy, and Sunny, son of the great Seminole chief Osceola. Teresa's father, a violent man, has heard about the fugitive slaves settled on the other side of the border and plans to profit from them. As the story progresses, multiple actors come into play, forming alliances or declaring each other enemy, as the Seminoles struggle to fulfill captain Coyote's corazonada to find their own land
A masterpiece of mood and setting, character and remembrance, The Cuban Club is Barry Gifford's ultimate coming-of-age story told as sixty-four linked tales, a creation myth of The Fall as seen through the eyes of an innocent boy on the cusp of becoming an innocent man. Set in Chicago in the 1950s and early '60s against the backdrop of small-time hoodlums in the Chicago mob and the girls and women attached to them, there is the nearness of heinous crimes, and the price to be paid for them. To Roy and his friends, these twists and tragedies drift by like curious flotsam. The tales themselves are koan-like, often ending in questions, with rarely a conclusion. One story, a letter from Roy to his father four years after his father's death, is written as if the older man were still alive. Indeed, throughout The Cuban Club Roy is in some doubt whether divorce or even death really exists in a world where everything seems so alive and connected. Barry Gifford has been writing his Roy stories on and off for over thirty years, and earlier Roy stories have been published in Wyoming, Memories from a Sinking Ship and The Roy Stories. But it is in The Cuban Club that he brings the form he has created in these stories to its crystallization. Indeed, to find precedents for The Cuban Club, we must look not to other story collections, but to other creation myths'to Gilgamesh, or the Old Testament, or Eduardo Galeano's Memory of Fire trilogy. Roy's age here wends back and forth between six and nineteen and back to twelve. He sees with the ageless eyes of a seer and knows not to judge the good or the bad in circumstances or people, or even to question why things are as they are, instead gathering to himself the romance of a world that teeters on catastrophe always, even as it abounds in saving graces
God in these Southern Nights is only another possibly deranged near relative, cast in the only nonspeaking part in this human drama. Everyone else talks and talks. And it's the dialogue in these novels that makes them three of Gifford' best, reminders of the author's seemingly unlimited range and versatility, a comic-tragic genius for our time. Night People, Arise & Walk, and Baby Cat-Face stand out for their sheer velocity; for the copious, raw violence; for the invented religions and gods that make people do things; and for all the other horrors that somehow cohabit—affably—with the genuine pathos and loveliness of the many unforgettable characters and the things these characters say so winningly that we've never heard anyone say before.
