Barry Gifford's Books
Jun.01.1997
With the grace and style of a souped-up Seville—and published to coincide with the annual race extravaganza at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah—Hot Rod captures the American obsession with speed, thrills, and cars in this unparalleled collection of photographs. From the chop shops of East Bakersfield to the drag strips and deserts of California and Utah, David Perry’s photographs...
May.12.1997
Gifford’s father, Rudy Winston, was considered a “good man to know” in the wild and woolly Chicago of the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s. His list of friends and acquaintances included everyone from the mayor of Chicago and actress Dorothy Lamour to characters with monikers like Willie “the Hero” Nero and Arnold “Suitcase Solly” Banks. To his son, however, he was practically a stranger....
Mar.01.1997
Screenplay of Lost Highway, co-written with writer and director David Lynch
Sep.09.1996
In Perdita Durango, Gifford brings us the uniquely villainous Perdita, born as a minor character in Wild at Heart and reincarnated here as the killer-lovely queen in a rogue’s gallery of gangsters and bad girls. Perdita is the high priestess of bad behavior. Teamed up with the handsome, deranged bordertown dealer and santero Romero Dolorosa, they wreak havoc across Texas,...
Apr.03.1996
In the visual equivalent of sound bites, novelist and poet Gifford (Ghosts No Horse Can Carry, Port Tropique) cuts to the heart with sharply focused shots of young lovers on the lam. “You mark me the deepest,” says twenty-year-old Lula Pace to Sailor Ripley as they’re reunited after Sailor’s two-year stint in prison for manslaughter. Though it means breaking parole for Sailor, the...
Sep.01.1995
From Barry Gifford comes 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).
Apr.01.1995
Plays in three episodes, which take place in the same New York City at three different times.
Jul.07.1994
It’s time to check in again with Barry Gifford’s gang of New Orleans weirdos. A few of our old favorites from Night People (1992) are back, including Marble Lesson, the lethal leader of the Mary Mother of God Rape Crisis Center, but there are also plenty of new, equally bizarre faces: We’ve got Croesus Spit Spackle and Demetrious Ice D Youngblood, ex-cons out to rid the world of...
Oct.01.1992
Gifford (Wild at Heart) never shies away from confrontational fiction even when it strains credulity. Yet these four well-wrought, linked novellas, all dealing with struggle and violence—particularly violence toward women—and all set in dark corners of the South, all have the stamp of truth. Big Betty Stalcup and Miss Cutie Early, two lesbian ex-convicts, preach the gospel of Miss...
Mar.01.1989
More than 400 pages of poems by Barry Gifford spanning two decades.
Oct.01.1984
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...
Sep.01.1981
Eighty pages of Barry Gifford’s poems, spanning a little more than a decade.
Dec.01.1978
Here, in what has become a classic of its kind since its publication in 1978, is the fascinating story of an American literary legend, recorded through the voices of the friends and lovers of Jack Kerouac, “King of the Beats.” Authors Barry Gifford and Lawrence Lee retraced Keoruac’s life at home and on the road, and talked with the prophets, musicians, poets, socialites, and...
An Unfortunate Woman is an extraordinary and curious book: It is fiction written as autobiography or simulated oral history; a “woman’s story”—intensely individual and personal—that is written by a man. –Rob Swigart, San Francisco Chronicle
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,...