Barry Gifford Books In Order

The Imagination of the Heart

The Imagination of the Heart is the final chapter in the saga of Sailor Ripley and Lula Pace Fortune, the ‘Romeo and Juliet of the Deep South.’ Their story began in Barry Gifford’s novel Wild at Heart, which in 1990 was made into a Palme d’Or winning feature film by David Lynch. Following Sailor’s death at the age of sixty five in New Orleans, Lula moved back to her home state of North Carolina. This novel begins fifteen years later when Lula, at age eighty, decides to write a memoir in diary form, reflecting on her life with Sailor while also keeping a journal describing her last road trip: a journey with Beany Thorn, her best friend since childhood, back to New Orleans. Like a contemporary book of Revelations, dutifully recorded by Lula as a dialogue between self and soul, it becomes a bittersweet, often dangerous journey into The Imagination of the Heart, and what may lie beyond. Also included in this edition is ‘The Truth is in the Work,’ a conversation between Barry Gifford and Noel King which delves into a range of topics, from Gifford s early publishing experiences to his film projects and to professional sports.

The Wild Life Of Sailor And Lula

This volume comprises six interlocking novels which chart the wild lives of star crossed lovers Sailor Ripley and Lula Pace Fortune. The bizarre and varied characters of the stories inhabit a surreal world where paradoxes abound.

Port Tropique

Revolution is simmering in the heat of battered Central American town Port Tropique, where protagonist Franz Hall is an ‘intellectual Meursault in a paranoid Hemingway landscape, a self conscious Conradian adventurer, a Lord Jim in the earliest stages of selfwilled failure’ New York Times. The ineffectual hero spends his days drinking and observing people in the z calo, and occasional nights involved in an ivory smuggling operation threatened by impending government siege. Always persistent are memories of Marie and what was lost. In this sinuous narrative of dislocation and remorse, Barry Gifford details Franz’s mundanity and the bizarre cast of characters swirling around him.

Night People

The author of Wild at Heart and The Wild Life of Sailor and Lula writes of what Tennessee Williams called something wild in the country/that only the Night People know. He draws his characters from the shadows of the Deep South, where they confront the chaotic horror of the United States at the end of the twentieth century.

Baby Cat-Face

From the author of Wild at Heart, a wild, wacky, funny, well written, and surreal novel Kansas City Star about a woman struggling to make her way in a New Orleans so feverishly peculiar that Anne Rice would feel at ease there Washington Post.

The Sinaloa Story

Few writers have explored the margins of our world with the insight and understanding of Barry Gifford, and his newest novel takes him to the border and beyond, with a cast of characters who come straight out of the darkest corners of the imagination. Ava Varazo, a beautiful woman from a small village in Mexico, works in a brothel in the border town of La Paz, Arizona. When one of her customers, DelRay Mudo, a motorcycle mechanic from Guadelupe, falls in love with her, Ava seizes the chance to change her life. Indio Desacato, a rich racketeer from Sinaloa, Texas, is enamored of Ava and has asked her to be the queen of his own house. Desacato, Ava tells DelRay, brags that he never keeps less than half a million dollars, in cash, at his mansion. DelRay, whose own future holds no great promise outside of Ava, agrees to go to Sinaloa with her. They kill Desacato together, but Ava abandons DelRay as she had planned all along and disappears with the loot. DelRay tracks her down to her home in Mexico, but Ava is no longer the woman she was in La Paz, and DelRay finds himself unexpectedly caught between a campesino revolution and a pair of assassins. Expertly shifting between the tender and the terrifying, Barry Gifford has written a book that leaves both our nerves, and our minds, on an electrifying edge.

Wyoming

‘ A subtle, impeccably rendered new novel from one of America’s most distinctive writers. A woman and her young son are traveling together by car through the southern and midwestern United States in the mid to late 1950s. As the mother drives, she and the boy, Roy, talk about their lives, their disappointments, and their dreams. ‘Wyoming‘ exists as a state of mind rather than an actual place, a place neither the boy nor his mother have ever been, an idyll where the two of them can live an untroubled life. Told entirely in dialogue, the story of Roy and his mother traverses both real and imaginary states of being, on a tour through an uncertain but hopeful landscape of longing and myth. As Roy’s mother tells him, ‘Everybody needs Wyoming.’ Combining a spare and elegant style with profound and clear eyed feeling, Wyoming is the most sensitive and touching work of Barry Gifford’s brilliant career.’

Hotel Room Trilogy

In this collection of three plays set in the same hotel room, award winning novelist Barry Gifford brings his highly acclaimed writing to the theater for the first time. In ‘Tricks’ Moe and Lou share Darlene, a hooker they pass back and forth as they exchange and appropriate each other’s identities in alternating moments of confusion and revelation. In ‘Blackout’ Danny and Diane, an Oklahoma couple of the 1930s, cannot move beyond the grief of a personal tragedy. Refusing to accept the death of her son, Diane seeks refuge in low level deliriums. In the third play, ‘Mrs. Kashfi, ‘ a young boy experiences a spooky visitation while his mother voyages into the sea of clairvoyance with a fortune teller.

My Last Martini

Poetry. ‘Gifford’s spare, elliptical poems, formally ‘open’ and underpunctuated but readily comprehensible. reveal the poet as a meditative, lonely observer, haunted by memory’s ‘ghosts’ and caught in the seasonal vicissitudes of experience, with an eye for plain but evocative detail. at his best Gifford recalls William Carlos Williams: particular, lyrical but laconic, compassionate but unsentimental’ Publishers Weekly.

American Falls

American Falls is the first major collection of short stories from Barry Gifford, master of the dark side of the American reality. These stories range widely in style and period, from the 1950s to the present, from absurdist exercises to romantic tales, from stories about childhood innocence to novellas of murder and revenge. In the title story, a Japanese American motel operator chooses not give up a total stranger, a black man wanted for murder, when the police come searching for him. In ‘Room 584, The Starr Hotel,’ a man rants his outrage at an amorous couple in the room next door before he himself is arrested for having committed multiple murders. ‘The Unspoken’ recounts the confessions of a man without a mouth who tells about the woman who loved him. And in this collection’s longest fiction, a novella called ‘The Lonely and the Lost,’ a small town s talented and colorful inhabitants solve their problems as best they can until it comes time for the devil to reap what they have sown. Dark and light intermix in masterful chiaroscuro, dark becoming light, light revealing sinister or brooding complexity. No simple endings, only happy beginnings.

The Rooster Trapped in the Reptile Room

This anthology from one of America’s foremost contemporary literary figures brims with an array of genre-crossing delights including novel excerpts, short fiction, poetry, memoir, a screenplay excerpt, and an interview. For the first time together, here are excerpts from the six Sailor and Lula novels, dark tales from Night People, selected verse, and childhood stories from The Phantom Father. The screen-play excerpts are from Lost Highway, cowritten with David Lynch. Gifford’s most recent novel, Wyoming, was named a Best Novel of the Year by the Los Angeles Times.

Do the Blind Dream?

Do the Blind Dream?? shows Gifford at the height of his powers, navigating with ease the new, more fragmented imaginative landscape of morning after America. Gifford seems to have anticipated themes that suddenly are recognizable everywhere: the fragility of identity; the power of coincidence; the illusion of a secure tomorrow. In contrast to his often nightmarish, satirical, groundbreaking novels of the 1990s Wild at Heart, Perdita Durango, and Night People among them Do the Blind Dream?? continues in the tender and deeply introspective vein revealed in two recent works: Gifford’s memoir The Phantom Father named a New York Times Notable Book, and the award winning novella Wyoming. From the intimate, stylistically daring examination of the darkest secrets in the history of an Italian family, to the terrible but often beautiful fears and discoveries of childhood, to the sardonic, desperate confusion of adult life, Do the Blind Dream?? reveals an exceptionally versatile, highly tuned sensibility. Here is further evidence of what Alan Ryan wrote in the Atlantic Journal Constitution: ‘Gifford is one of those brave writers who go their own way, and challenge readers to follow.’Almost a quarter of a century ago, Armistead Maupin wrote that ‘Barry Gifford is all the proof the world will ever need that a writer who listens with his heart is capable of telling anyone s story.’ Yet only now does Gifford s sense of the American psyche converge with our own.

The Stars Above Vera Cruz

A high wire artist named Ropedancer is our guide to Gifford’s world in The Stars Above Veracruz. His tale opens and closes this book of linked short fictions that take place in Honduras, France, Cuba, Paris, New York, New Zealand, Mexico, and other locales. Gifford s lyrical stories are often confessional, involving crimes large and small and narrators who, win or lose in their battles, never emerge unscathed. There is little triumphing here; victory lies in the completion of the journey, the survival of the high wire artist who, step by step, follows his lifeline with utter concentration. At once tragic and humorous, full of pathos, and reminiscent of Thornton Wilder s humanist classic The Bridge of San Luis Rey, The Stars Above Veracruz is Gifford s most significant work since Wild at Heart.

Memories From a Sinking Ship

Praise for Barry Gifford:

‘Gifford cuts right through to the heart of what makes a good novel readable and entertaining…
. The way Barry Gifford does it, it’s high art.’ Elmore Leonard

‘Barry Gifford is all the proof the world will ever need that a writer who listens with his heart is capable of telling anyone’s story.’ Armistead Maupin

‘Barry Gifford is a great writer, may Heaven and all help him, consequently.’ William Saroyan

‘Nearly every Gifford story opens a Pandora’s Box of uncontainable emotions…
. There’s no one like Barry Gifford, which is the best reason to read him.’ Richard Dyer, The Boston Globe

In this episodic novel, Barry Gifford lays bare his young heart, exploring the hopes and disappointments of a uniquely American childhood and adolescence. He recounts his travels with his mother, spent considering the intersection of the landscape and their lives, and an ailing gangster father, most conspicuously influential in his son’s life by his absence. Memories From a Sinking Ship conjures an era the late 1940s through the early 1960s and places Chicago, the Florida Keys, New Orleans to which we can never return.

The author of more than forty published works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, which have been translated into more than twenty five languages, Barry Gifford is an American writer in the European tradition, an hommes des lettres. His novel Wild at Heart was made into an award winning film by David Lynch. He has also received awards from the ALA, PEN, and the NEA.

Lost Highway

A screenplay which provides an investigation into parallel identity crises. A dazed and confused Pete Dayton is found in the cell of Fred Madison, a prisoner awaiting execution for murder. Dayton has no recollection of how he got there, and Madison is missing.

Jack’s Book

Here, in what has become a classic of its kind since its publication in 1978, is the fascinating story of Jack Kerouac, ‘King of the Beats’ and American literary legend, recorded through the voices of his friends and lovers. Authors Barry Gifford and Lawrence Lee retraced Kerouac’s life at home and on the road and talked with the prophets, musicians, poets, socialites, and working people who knew Jack Kerouac. Some are famous like Allen Ginsberg, Gore Vidal, William Burroughs, Gary Snyder, among others; and some are not like Jack’s boyhood buddies, his lovers, and his barroom companions. All, however, have contributed to a remarkably vibrant, riveting portrait of a life. We see Jack at Columbia University and on the scene of Greenwich Village; speeding across the tarmac of America with Neal Cassidy ‘Dan Moriarty’ in Kerouac’s classic novel, On the Road; at home with his possessive mother; in California, drinking wine and talking Buddhism; and finally, in Florida, where his life ends tragically at forty seven years old. Jack’s Book, like Kerouac’s novels, makes a unique contribution to our understanding of a man and a generation that shaped the dreams and visions of those who followed.

Saroyan

Along with Ernest Hemingway, William Saroyan winner of a Pulitzer Prize in drama for The Time of Your Life and an Academy Award for the screenplay of The Human Comedy, was the most well known American writer of the 1930s and 1940s. Peabody Award winning journalist Lawrence Lee and award winning novelist Barry Gifford heard Saroyan‘s story first hand from Carol Matthau, the wife he rejected; the son and daughter he alternately smothered and pushed away; and colleagues like Artie Shaw, Celeste Holm, and Lillian Gish. Their revelations bring new depth to Saroyan‘s riveting story.

Phantom Father

Ruby Wilson, Barry Gifford’s father, ran an all night liquor store/drugstore in Chicago, next door to the Club Alabama, where Barry used to watch showgirls rehearse on Saturday afternoons. Some mornings he ate breakfast at the small lunch counter in the store, dunking doughnuts with the organ grinders’ monkey. Other times he rode with his father to small towns in Illinois, where Ruby would meet someone while Barry waited for him in a diner. Everybody who was anybody in Chicago in the 30s, 40s, and 50s knew Barry Winston. Ruby Winston separated from Barry’s mother when Barry was eight, married agaid as did his mother, and died when Barry was twelve, leaving behind an elusive but powerful imprint, a constant, translucent presence. The Phantom Father explores the many sides of his unique bounty that remain in Barry Gifford’s life the allure and excitement of his father’s world, the mystery he left in Barry’s life, and the yearning to understand what he left behind. When Barry was a teenager, a friend of his asked, ‘Your father was a killer, wasn’t he?’ There is no easy answer to that question. Ruby Winston was a good man to know, and sometimes a dangerous man to know, but he was always a fascinating man to know.

Out of the Past

For both the film buff and the general moviegoer a handbook that unlocks the secrets of a hundred noir movies ‘Gifford knows his noir. The essays are better than some of the films he writes about.’ Elmore Leonard For a tour of noir cinema this handbook is the perfect companion and Barry Gifford is an ideal guide. His choice selection of films exposes the menacing, moody, and oftentimes violent underbelly of this dark movie genre that occupies a favorite niche in American popular culture. Some are classics, some are little known and seldom seen, but all, once viewed, are deeply remembered by aficionados of noir. Gifford’s roll call of unforgettables includes these, and more: The Asphalt Jungle, Body and Soul, Body Heat, Charley Varrick, Chinatown, The Devil Thumbs a Ride, D.O.A., Double Indemnity, High Sierra, Key Largo, Kiss of Death, Mean Streets, Mildred Pierce, Mr. Majestyk, Out of the Past, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, Strangers on a Train, White Heat, along with several noir classics from Europe Repulsion, The Hidden Room, Shoot the Piano Player, The 400 Blows, Odd Man Out. Gifford identifies the directors and names the many noir stars, the greats and not so greats who were cast in the indelible roles of hoods, B girls, psychopaths, grifters, gumshoes, waifs, tarts, femme fatales, mobsters, molls, and ex cons. In an introduction novelists Edward Gorman and Dow Mossman applaud Gifford’s selections and his insights: ‘The movies discussed here range from the lowest of the B’s to the biggest of the A’s, and this book is going to make you want to run out and locate every one of them and good luck to you; finding The Devil Thumbs a Ride could take you a lifetime. Through Barry Gifford’s eyes we begin to see their similarities and their value. What Andrew Sarris did for the mainstream film in The American Cinema, Barry does here for the crime film.’ With a connoisseur’s insight and an offbeat sensitivity perfectly tailored to his subjects, Gifford’s brief essays cover a hundred of the noir buff’s favorites. His highly polished impressions take the reader through five decades of noir to find both the heart and the art of the plotline. Barry Gifford is a poet, novelist, and playwright. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Among his books is Hotel Room Trilogy University Press of Mississippi.

Bordertown

This book is the culmination of a road trip along the Mexican American border taken by the two authors. They spent a month between Brownsville, Texas on the Gulf of Mexico and Tijuana on the Pacific Ocean documenting their travels in word and picture. The text is an anecdotal weaving together of the events and news along the border. Most of the towns are out of the way and give the feeling of their remoteness and uniqueness on both sides of the border.

The Cavalry Charges

Part memoir, part literary criticism, part free rumination on life and experience The Cavalry Charges is a treasure trove of wisdom and insight.