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A world of poems as populous and diverse as it is ephemeral and evanescent, born of the world and of books and art in equal measure, yielding granite truths and feather truths of people's roller-coaster lives. The poet looks back, facing life and death and everything in between with equanimity, holding a steady hand to the quivering breast wherever there is breath.
Published in The New Yorker, La Nouvelle Revue Fran¨aise, and in nearly a hundred magazines and poetry journals from Los Angeles to Tokyo, from Lawrence, Kansas to Rome, Madrid, Paris, London, Beijing, and Bucharest, poems by Barry Gifford have been describing and changing our world for nearly half a century. Here in one volume for the first time is the poet's own choices from his nine previous collections, as well as a rich selection of new poems. Imagining Paradise sums up the tremendous achievement of an underground poet who lasted.
available on Amazon.com
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ONLINE EXCLUSIVE:
New Sailor and Lula short story
Written for the L.A. Museum of Modern Art's "Cell Phone Stories Project."
Gifford has set his Wild at Heart characters loose at the museum, where they’ve come upon Andy Warhol’s Black and White Disaster.
http://lacma.wordpress.com/2010/08/27/this-weekend-at-lacma-6/
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Sad Stories of the Death of Kings
Published by Seven Stories Press
http://www.sevenstories.com/book/?GCOI=58322100463420
Roy is a lover of adventure movies, a budding writer, and a young man slowly coming of age without the benefit of a father. Surrounding him—whether to support him or to drag him under—is the adult world of postwar Chicago, a city haunted by violence, poverty, and the redeeming power of imagination. Here are charlatans, operators, alien abductees, schoolyard nudists, and fast girls with only months to live. At the center of it all is a boy learning to navigate the compromises, disillusionments and regrets that come with the territory of living. Mixing memoir and invention, the forty-one short stories in Barry Gifford's first book for young adults bring a city—and a boy's growing consciousness—to vivid, unflinching life.
Reviews:
Barry Gifford's Sad Stories of the Death of Kings gleams like a stolen silver dollar; one boy's search for wisdom among the hustlers, criminals, and wise guys that reads as evocatively as anything out of Nelson Algren. These stories, sometimes only a page or two, riddled with sharp, subtle dialogue, all glow with the devastating, sometimes gruesome wisdom of Sherwood Anderson and Flannery O'Connor.
- Joe Meno, author of The Great Perhaps and Hairstyles of the Damned
Gifford's great talent captures defining moments with the casual grace of anecdote. [He] makes the anecdotal monumental.
- Jonathan Keats, San Francisco Magazine
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Sailor and Lula:
The Complete Novels
On the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Barry Gifford's international bestseller, Wild at Heart, and as well as the anniversary of the Palme d'Or-winning film adaptation by director David Lynch, Sailor & Lula: The Complete Novels presents all of the novels and novellas that comprise the saga of Sailor Ripley and Lula Pace Fortune, "the Romeo and Juliet of the South": Wild at Heart, Perdita Durango (also made into a feature film), Sailor's Holiday, Sultans of Africa, Consuelo's Kiss, Bad Day for the Leopard Man, and The Imagination of the Heart.
"Gifford sketches marvelous characters as deftly as William Faulkner and animates them in scene after scene of hilarious dialogue. . .. Barry Gifford continues to be one of America's most original writers."
-- Playboy
"Barry Gifford invented his own American vernacular -- William Faulkner by way of B-movie film noir, porn paperbacks, and Sun Records rockabilly -- to forge the stealth-epic of Sailor &; Lula. His accomplishment looks more and more like one of the permanent glories of recent storytelling, a set of crude masterpieces like Philip Guston's late paintings. The compression and verve on view on every page of this compendium is as irresistible and dizzying as a dish of brandy-filled chocolates forged in shapes of pistols, hangmen's ropes, convertible automobiles, and unclad, steamy bodies, daring you to keep gobbling them up."
-- Jonathan Lethem
"I saw Sailor and Lula in love in the middle of a crazy, violent, wild world, and I wanted to go on that trip with them. . . . It's like looking into the Garden of Eden before things went bad."
-- David Lynch
Available now from: Seven Stories
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The Imagination of the Heart
Book Seven of the Story of Sailor and Lula
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.
"Gifford has been the master of hip disenfranchisement for more than a quarter of a century, and American literature is much better for his efforts. . . . Similar to Faulkner's Yoknapatawphan County, Gifford creates a geography of interlinking and overlapping characters. . . . in search of their own proverbial dream. Lula in particular shines with an earthy casualness that makes her one of the most appealing and sympathetic characters in contemporary fiction. As Andrei Codrescu posits . . . 'Barry Gifford is both a cult writer and a great one.' "
-- David Hellman, San Francisco Chronicle
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NEW AUDIOBOOK: Memories from a Sinking Ship |
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"If you bemoan the lack of something different
in your fiction, the search is over."
— Andrew Vachss, The Chicago Tribune
Memories from a Sinking Ship recounts a uniquely American childhood and adolescence through a boy's travels with his mother and ailing gangster father, as well as adventures with neighborhood characters such as The Viper, The Pharaoh and Skull Dorfman. Set against the backdrop of 1950s and '60s Chicago, the Florida Keys, and New Orleans, and similar in structure and tone to Ernest Hemingway's Nick Adams stories and those in Nelson Algren's The Neon Wilderness, Gifford's Memories conjures up an intimate portrait of an America that no longer exists. Read by the author, this two-disc collection contains 25 compelling tales from the novel with evocative original music by Oscar Bucher. A selection of these stories was awarded the Christopher Isherwood Foundation Prize for Fiction in 2006.
"Nearly every Gifford story opens a Pandora's box of uncontainable emotions," wrote Richard Dyer in the Boston Globe. "There's no one like Barry Gifford, which is the best reason to read him."
Listen to a sample chapter here.
BUY NOW:
Produced and recorded
with original music by Oscar Bucher
at OB3 Studios in San Francisco
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Memories from a Sinking Ship |
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"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
click here for the rest
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The Cavalry Charges |
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The Cavalry Charges, the latest collection of writing by Gifford, is part memoir, part literary criticism, and spiked with rumination on life and experience. Relating many of the key experiences that shaped him as a writer, Gifford includes: A nine-part dossier on the 1961 film One-Eyed Jacks in which Gifford examines
click here for the rest
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Please Resubmit Contacts |
If you attempted to contact us via AskOscar or sign up for the Mailing List between Feb 5th and March 7th, please resubmit as our server was experiencing problems during this time. Thank you.
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The Stars Above Veracruz |
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"An artful ride down dangerous roads . . . but it's a joy following [Gifford] along."--Kirkus Reviews
"Move over Hemingway (and put down the damn gun)! [The Stars Above Veracruz] just knocked my socks off."--San Francisco Chronicle
click here for the rest
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Ball Lightning |
Now playing exclusively on BarryGifford.com
Written by Barry Gifford.
Directed by Amy Glazer.
Produced by Kevin Johnson.
QuickTime required.
If you don't have QuickTime, you can download a free player from Apple.
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Il Carnevale |
Now playing exclusively on BarryGifford.com
Written by Barry Gifford & Ray Gatchalian.
Directed by Barry Gifford.
Filmed on location in Venice, Italy.
QuickTime required.
If you don't have QuickTime, you can download a free player from Apple.
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Read 'Em and Weep |
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"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."
click here for the rest
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Back in America |
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"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
click here for the rest
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Do the Blind Dream? |
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"I love Do the Blind Dream?—a wonderful and delightful piece that tastes of Buñuel and Cocteau."
-- Pedro Almodóvar
"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.
click here for the rest
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Brando Rides Alone |
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"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
click here for the rest
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The Rooster Trapped in the Reptile Room
A Barry Gifford Reader |
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"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 — 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
click here for the rest
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American Falls |
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"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.
click here for the rest
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The Phantom Father |
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"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.
click here for the rest
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Replies to Wang Wei |
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"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.
click here for the rest
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Out of the Past |
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"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
click here for the rest
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Wyoming |
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"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.
click here for the rest
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Copyright © by Barry Gifford, 2004. All rights reserved.
May not be reproduced without the permission of the author.
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