Bird & Beckett
653 Chenery Street
Glen Park district, San Francisco 94131
(415) 586-3733
http://www.bird-beckett.com/
Ball Lightning: Now playing exclusively on BarryGifford.com
Written by Barry Gifford.
Directed by Amy Glazer.
Produced by Kevin Johnson.
Il Carnevale: Now playing exclusively on BarryGifford.com
Written by Barry Gifford & Ray Gatchalian.
Directed by Barry Gifford.
Filmed on location in Venice, Italy.
Read 'Em and Weep
Do the Blind Dream?
"Read 'Em and Weep is an engaging collection of Gifford's anecdotes, reviews and responses to his favorite novels. At turns deeply moving, humorous, insightful and poignant, they are each prompting literary takes, intimate and accessible."
Back in America
"Barry Gifford has been chronicling the decline of Western Civilization for 25 years; as America goes, so goes Mr. Gifford."
-- The New York Times Book Review
"Barry Gifford's pure lyrical self shines in these poems. The flickering lights visible in the swirling noir of his fiction are in the foreground here."
-- Andrei Codrescu
Do the Blind Dream?
"I love Do the Blind Dream?Ña wonderful and delightful piece that tastes of Bu–uel and Cocteau."
-- Pedro Almod—var
"Barry Gifford was, is, and always shall be an American Original. His work evokes so many sensibilities, from the Beats to noir to social realism to postmodernism to cinematic, both stirring up ghosts and invoking the future. For those who haven't had the pleasure, or for old friends catching up: Read this book."
-- Richard Price
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.
Brando Rides Alone
"In Gifford's fundamentally twisted world, Jesus and Peckinpah seem like a natural pairing."
-- Kirkus Reviews
"Gifford's manner is mandarin; he doesn't waste words, preach, or point out morals ... there is a wild streak of black humor running through nearly everything [he writes].... There's no one like Barry Gifford, which is the best reason to read him."
-- Richard Dyer,
Boston Globe
The Rooster Trapped in the Reptile Room
A Barry Gifford Reader
"Everything I have to say about race and religion and politics is in the novels," declares Barry Gifford. The Rooster Trapped in the Reptile Room gathers generous portions of all thirteen novels and novellas. Nine, including Wild at Heart and Night People, are restored to original sequence. The broad contours of an episodic output emerge Ñ a full-length view of the freaks and freakish incidents that populate Gifford's unique human comedy. A world, as Lula, the author's favorite of all his characters, reflects, "wild at heart and weird on top."
-- Thomas A. McCarthy,
Seven Stories Press
BORDERTOWN, A journey with Barry Gifford
Part 5 of 5 weekly segments now playing exclusively on BarryGifford.com
A film directed by Georges Luneau
Nestor Productions
American Falls
"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
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.
The Phantom Father
"The Phantom Father... is a book that gratifyingly kisses the past without retelling it.."
-- Booklist
Barry Gifford's father, a racketeer who ran an all-night liquor store in the 1950s, is memorialized in this unsentimental series of vignettes that capture the reckless glitz of mob-run Chicago.
Replies To Wang Wei, Poems by Barry Gifford
"Gifford never fails to surprise. These poems read like zen dominoes: no matter how shuffled, they always seem to come out right."
-- Booklist
Barry Gifford, author of the novels Wild at Heart, Night People, Perdita Durango and, most recently, Wyoming, presents us with a collection of gems, poems mostly in the Chinese manner, fashioned as a response to the work of the great poet of the T'ang dynasty, Wang Wei.
Out of the Past
"Gifford knows his noir. The essays are better than some of the films he writes about."
-- Elmore Leonard
For both the film buff and the general moviegoer a handbook that unlocks the secrets of a hundred noir movies
Wyoming
"Gifford is a marvelous talent."
-- Washington Post
"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.