Barry Gifford's Books
Apr.01.2010
On the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Barry Gifford’s international bestseller Wild at Heart, as well as on the anniversary of the Cannes Palme d’Or–winning film adaptation by director David Lynch, Sailor & Lula: The Complete Novels presents all seven of the novels and novellas that comprise the saga of Sailor Ripley and Lula Pace Fortune, “the Romeo and Juliet of...
Sep.25.2007
The coming-of-age novel that Barry Gifford was born to write, Memories from a Sinking Ship recounts a uniquely American childhood and adolescence through a boy’s travels with his mother and occasional time spent with an ailing gangster father. Memories from a Sinking Ship completes the spellbinding, largely autobiographical account begun previously in Wyoming and in the memoir The...
Apr.20.2007
Barry Gifford’s diverse interests, varied influences, wide travels, and multitudinous acquaintances have fueled his prolific writing career. In a series of anecdotal reflections, Gifford relates many of the key experiences that shaped him as a writer: a nine-part dossier on the 1961 Marlon Brando film One-Eyed Jacks in which Gifford examines the public and private lives of those...
Dec.13.2005
As author Barry Gifford was writing these pieces, he gradually came to realize that what he was creating was a geographical fiction, or a geography of fictions. As Barry explains, “Everybody has a story, no matter where they are in the world, and I conceived the device of The Ropedancer when I was in Veracruz, Mexico, at a hotel much like the Hotel Los Regalos de Dios, where the...
Nov.01.2004
Barry Gifford’s spare eloquence considers such diverse topics as his friend Allen Ginsberg’s death, the art of Vermeer, a cowboy wino, and September 11th in this collection of new poems. Delving into themes of love and death, Gifford offers heartbreaking verse such as “You sleep with my soul in your mouth/When we kiss I can taste it” and “If you can choose, it’s not love.” Although...
Apr.01.2004
The author of Wild at Heart and Night People reaches the height of his powers in Do the Blind Dream?, navigating with ease the new, more fragmented, imaginative landscape of morning-after America. Barry 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.
Jan.05.2004
Part critique, part witty polemic, this revisiting of one of the 1960s’ most tortured and misunderstood productions finds a flawed masterpiece that survived multiple writers (including Stanley Kubrick), an egomaniacal star with no previous directing experience, and a virulent critical reaction to become, in retrospect, a crucial rethinking of the Western genre. Included is an...
Sep.23.2003
Wild at Heart introduced readers to Sailor Ripley and Lula Pace Fortune, the most sex-driven, star-crossed lovers since Romeo and Juliet. Now they’re back. Previously published as Sailor’s Holiday, The Wild Life of Sailor and Lula picks up with their wild life as they evade murderers, track down their kidnapped son and watch him acquire his daddy’s predilection for trouble, and...
Mar.01.2003
“Everything I have to say about race and religion and politics is in the novels,” declares Barry Gifford. The Rooster gathers generous portions of all thirteen novels and novellas, along with essays, a screenplay excerpt, and much more.
Jun.01.2002
Delving into such pastimes as kidnapping, prostitution, drug dealing, robbery, rape and murder, Bordertown is stunning story which combines Gifford’s fictional vignettes with real-life visual accounts of the many lost and desperate characters who haunt the towns along the U.S.-Mexico border. These tales document the dispossessed Mexicans who must either hustle on the streets or...
Apr.01.2002
The stories in this collection range in period, style, and theme from the 1950s to the present, from absurdist to romantic, from childhood innocence to murder and revenge. In the title story, a Japanese American motel owner chooses not to betray a total stranger wanted for murder when the police come looking for him. In the novella The Lonely and the Lost, a small town’s...
Jan.01.2001
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...
Jul.12.2000
A woman and her young son travel by car through the southern and Midwestern United States in this heartbreakingly spare novel-in-dialogue. As the mother drives, she and the boy, Roy, trade impressions of the landscape and of life, approaching an understanding of how the two interrelate. “Everybody needs Wyoming,” she tells him.
Jan.01.2000
From the author of Night People, Wild at Heart, The Sinaloa Story, and more than a dozen other works of award-winning fiction and nonfiction comes this piquant collection of short stories with a distinctive continental flavor.
May.07.1998
Employing a strange and bountiful cast of characters, The Sinaloa Story bobs and weaves as if challenging the reader to follow a spectacular, if often incoherent, narrative. This is no small task, considering the action rolls at a page-turning clip and reads like a noir film treatment in which characters are ushered in and out of the plot with the speed and finality of a high-...
About Barry
Barry Gifford’s novels have been translated into twenty-eight languages. His book Night People was awarded the Premio Brancati in Italy, and he has been the recipient of awards from PEN, the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Library Association,...