Barry Gifford

Despite her mother's disapproval, Lula Pace Fortune joins her boyfriend, Sailor Ripley, when he finishes serving his prison sentence for murder

The Story of Sailor and Lula

Wild at Heart

David Lynch

Presents the screenplay of the film about what happens when Pete Dayton is found, dazed and confused, in the Death Row cell which should have held convicted wife-murderer Fred Madison

Lost Highway

Lawrence Lee

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.

An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac

Jack's Book

The author of Wild at Heart pictures New Orleans in the near future, torn apart by madmen bent on exacting a just vengeance before they are destroyed. Reprint. Tour.

A Novel

Arise and Walk

Bad girl Perdita Durango and her dealer boyfriend Romeo Dolorosa get their kicks on a journey from Louisiana to Los Angeles that involves santeria rituals and kidnapping.

Perdita Durango

Port Tropique

"A novel of violence, of love, and introspection, The Up-Down follows a man who leaves home and all that's familiar, finds true love, loses it, and finds it again. Pace's voyage is outward, among strangers, and inward into the fifth direction that is the up-down, in a sweeping, voracious human tale that takes no prisoners, witnesses extreme brutalities and expresses a childlike amazement. Here the route goes from New Orleans, to Chicago to Wyoming to Bay St. Clement, North Carolina, but the geography he is charting is always first and foremost unchartable"--

the almost lost, last Sailor and Lula story, in which their son, Pace Roscoe Ripley, finds his way

The up-down

The imagination of the heart

Author Barry Gifford gathers the scattered memories of his childhood to try to understand.

A Memoir

The Phantom Father

Francis Reeves discusses his unusual friendship with Jim and his own idiosyncratic view of life and the universe

The Pillow Book of Francis Reeves

Landscape with Traveler

From the author of Arise and Walk and Wild at Heart, a trio of one-act plays depicting the spooky, strange, and tragic passage of guests through the same hotel room

Hotel Room Trilogy

Southern Nights

The Stars Above Vera Cruz

New Novellas And Stories

Do The Blind Dream?

Winner of the 2007 Christopher Isherwood Foundation Award for Fiction Reminiscent of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Ernest Hemingway's Nick Adams stories, Memories from a Sinking Ship travels the landscape of a turbulent world seen through a boy’s steady gaze. Like Twain’s Mississippi River and Hemingway’s Big Two-Hearted, Gifford’s Chicago, New Orleans, and the highways and byways between offer us mesmerizing lives lost in the kaleidoscope of postwar America, in particular those of Roy’s adrift and disappointed mother and his hoodlum father.

Memories from a Sinking Ship

The Devil Thumbs a Ride, and Other Unforgettable Films

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, in the process approaching an understanding of each other and their shared inner landscape. "Mom, can we drive to Wyoming?" "You mean now?" "Uh-huh. Is it far?" "Very far. We're almost to Georgia." "Can we go someday?" "Sure, Roy, we'll go." "We won't tell anyone, right, Mom?" "No, baby, nobody will know where we are." "And we'll have a dog." "I don't see why not." "From now on when anything bad happens, I'm going to think about Wyoming. Running with my dog." "It's a good thing, baby. Everybody needs Wyoming." —from Wyoming

Wyoming

A masterpiece of mood and setting, character and remembrance, The Cuban Club is Barry Gifford's ultimate coming-of-age story told as sixty-seven linked tales, a creation myth of the Fall as seen through the eyes of an innocent boy on the cusp of becoming an innocent man. Set in Chicago in the 1950s and early 1960s against the backdrop of small-time hoodlums in the Chicago mob and the girls and women attached to them, there is the nearness of heinous crimes, and the price to be paid for them. To Roy and his friends, these twists and tragedies drift by like curious flotsam. The tales themselves are koan-like, often ending in questions, with rarely a conclusion. The story that closes the book is in the form of a letter from Roy to his father four years after his father's death, but written as if he were still alive. Indeed, throughout The Cuban Club Roy is in some doubt whether divorce or even death really exists in a world where everything seems so alive and connected. Barry Gifford has been writing his Roy stories on and off for over thirty years, and earlier Roy stories have been published in Wyoming, Memories from a Sinking Ship, and The Roy Stories. But it is in The Cuban Club that he brings the form he has created in these stories to its crystallization. Indeed, to find precedents for The Cuban Club, we must look not to other story collections, but to other creation myths--to Gilgamesh, or the Old Testament, or Eduardo Galeano's Memory of Fire trilogy. Roy's age here wends back and forth between six and nineteen and back to twelve. He sees with the eyes of a seer who doesn't seem to age, and knows not to judge the good or the bad in circumstances or people, or even to question why things are as they are, instead filled with the romance of the world teetering on catastrophe always, but abounding in saving graces.

The Cuban Club

As The Los Angeles Times wrote, New Mysteries of Paris is "not so much stories as character sketches, artfully drawn, as though told by people very close to their subjects - the narrator of Andr Breton's Nadja, a companion of King Farouk, the painter August Mack describing the young Paul Klee. Gifford is relentless in his imaginative scrutiny of human frailty." The four stories that evolve through each narrator's soul-searching are by turns straightforward, fantastic, bitter and erotic.

Barry Gifford

Books

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