Kirjahaku

Four related novellas explore themes of rape, religious fanaticism, aids, abuse, parents, and racism

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

The Cavalry Charges: Writings on Books, Film, and Music, Revised Edition is a collection of anecdotal reflections that relate many of the experiences that shaped Barry Gifford as a writer. Representative of Gifford’s body of work, this volume is divided into three sections: books, film and television, and music. Within these sections, Gifford’s best work is showcased, including a nine-part dossier on Marlon Brando’s One-Eyed Jacks, in which Gifford examines the public and private lives of those involved in the film, producing an innovative framework for the movie. New to the collection are four previously published essays: a brief look at the novels of Álvaro Mutis; a reflection on Gifford’s schooling under Nebraska poet John Neihardt; an essay on Elliot Chaze and his novel, Black Wings Has My Angel; and a short piece on Sailor and Lula.

The Cavalry Charges: Writings on Books, Film, and Music, Revised Edition is a collection of anecdotal reflections that relate many of the experiences that shaped Barry Gifford as a writer. Representative of Gifford’s body of work, this volume is divided into three sections: books, film and television, and music. Within these sections, Gifford’s best work is showcased, including a nine-part dossier on Marlon Brando’s One-Eyed Jacks, in which Gifford examines the public and private lives of those involved in the film, producing an innovative framework for the movie. New to the collection are four previously published essays: a brief look at the novels of Álvaro Mutis; a reflection on Gifford’s schooling under Nebraska poet John Neihardt; an essay on Elliot Chaze and his novel, Black Wings Has My Angel; and a short piece on Sailor and Lula.

For both the film buff and the general moviegoer a handbook that unlocks the secrets of a hundred noir movies ""Gifford knows his noir. The essays are better than some of the films he writes about."" - Elmore Leonard 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 by aficionados of noir. Gifford's roll call of unforgettables includes these, and more: The Asphalt Jungle, Body and Soul, Body Heat, Charley Varrick, Chinatown, The Devil Thumbs a Ride, D.O.A., Double Indemnity, High Sierra, Key Largo, Kiss of Death, Mean Streets, Mildred Pierce, Mr. Majestyk, Out of the Past, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, Strangers on a Train, White Heat, along with several noir classics from Europe -- Repulsion, The Hidden Room, Shoot the Piano Player, The 400 Blows, Odd Man Out. Gifford identifies the directors and names the many noir stars, the greats and not-so-greats who were cast in the indelible roles of hoods, B-girls, psychopaths, grifters, gumshoes, waifs, tarts, femme fatales, mobsters, molls, and ex-cons. In an introduction novelists Edward Gorman and Dow Mossman applaud Gifford's selections and his insights: ""The movies discussed here range from the lowest of the B's to the biggest of the A's, and this book is going to make you want to run out and locate every one of them (and good luck to you; finding The Devil Thumbs a Ride could take you a lifetime). Through Barry Gifford's eyes we begin to see their similarities and their value. What Andrew Sarris did for the mainstream film in The American Cinema, Barry does here for the crime film."" With a connoisseur's insight and an offbeat sensitivity perfectly tailored to his subjects, Gifford's brief essays cover a hundred of the noir buff's favorites. His highly polished impressions take the reader through five decades of noir to find both the heart and the art of the plotline. Barry Gifford is a poet, novelist, and playwright. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Among his books is Hotel Room Trilogy (University Press of Mississippi).

A new and diverse anthology from the author of Wyoming presents an array of novel excerpts, short stories, poetry, memoir, a screenplay excerpt, and an interview, including selections from the Sailor and Lula novels, tales from Night People, childhood stories from The Phantom Father, and more. Original.

"I love "Do the Blind Dream?"--a wonderful and delightful piece that tastes of Bunuel and Cocteau."--Pedro AlmodovarThe two new novellas and 11 stories in "Do the Blind Dream?" are Barry Gifford's most mature works of fiction to date. Almost a quarter of a century ago, Armistead Maupin wrote that "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." Yet only now does Gifford's sense of the American psyche converge with our own.In contrast to his often nightmarish, satirical, groundbreaking novels of the 1990s, "Wild at Heart, Perdita Durango," and "Night People, Do the Blind Dream?" dazzles by how it depicts the tender inner lives of the characters and the raging contradictions of their outer realities. In the title novella, members of an Italian family gather for their mother's funeral and confront how the sins of their father have cursed in some way each of their own troubled lives. In the story "Ball Lightning," a chance encounter at a gas station reunites a sister and brother, leading only to inexplicable tragedy.One of America's very finest and most accomplished writers of fiction, Barry Gifford is the author of the novels "Wild at Heart, Perdita Durango" and "Night People." His most recent books include "The Phantom Father," a "New York Times "notable Book of the Year; "Wyoming," a "Los Angeles Times" Novel of the Year; "American Falls," his collected short stories; and "The Rooster Trapped in the Reptile Room: A Barry Gifford Reader." He also cowrote the film "Lost Highway" (1997) with David Lynch, and co-wrote with director Matt Dillon the film "City of Ghosts" (2003). His essays and stories have appeared in "Punch, Esquire, Rolling Stone, The New York Times," and "El Pais," among other publications. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

"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, author of "Clockers"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.

Praise for Barry Gifford: "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"Barry Gifford is a great writer, may Heaven and all help him, consequently." --William Saroyan"Nearly every Gifford story opens a Pandora's Box of uncontainable emotions. . . . There's no one like Barry Gifford, which is the best reason to read him."--Richard Dyer, "The Boston Globe"In this episodic novel, Barry Gifford lays bare his young heart, exploring the hopes and disappointments of a uniquely American childhood and adolescence. He recounts his travels with his mother, spent considering the intersection of the landscape and their lives, and an ailing gangster father, most conspicuously influential in his son's life by his absence. "Memories from a Sinking Ship "conjures an era--the late 1940s through the early 1960s--and places--Chicago, the Florida Keys, New Orleans--to which we can never return.The author of more than forty published works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, which have been translated into more than twenty-five languages, Barry Gifford is an American writer in the European tradition, an "hommes des lettres. "His novel "Wild at Heart "was made into an award-winning film by David Lynch. He has also received awards from the ALA, PEN, and the NEA.

"Gifford uses the charged story of . . . an apprentice smuggler as an occasion for his own literary and cinematic smuggling--from Conrad, Hemingway, Camus, John Hawkes, Howard Hawks, Welles and Ozu, among others--and to discover a new literary form."--"The New York Times Book Review""A poet's nuanced prose runs through "Port Tropique" . . . a spellbinding story."--"The Washington Post""A strange, disturbing . . . intriguing . . . impressionist painting of a book."--"San Francisco Chronicle"Revolution is simmering in the heat of the battered Central American town Port Tropique, where protagonist Franz Hall is an "intellectual Meursault in a paranoid Hemingway landscape, a self-conscious Conradian adventurer, a Lord Jim in the earliest stages of self-willed failure" ("The New York Times"). The ineff ectual hero spends his days drinking and observing people in the "zocalo" and occasional nights involved in an ivory-smuggling operation threatened by impending government siege, yet always persistent are memories of Marie and what was lost. In this sinuous narrative of dislocation and remorse, Barry Gifford details Franz's mundanity and the bizarre cast of characters swirling around him.The author of more than forty published works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, which have been translated into more than twenty-five languages, Barry Gifford is an American writer in the European tradition, and one of the few contemporary American writers whose characters are familiar to audiences around the world.

"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.The author of more than forty published works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, which have been translated into more than twenty-five languages, Barry Gifford is one of the few contemporary American writers whose characters are familiar to audiences around the world. Recipient of awards from PEN, the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Library Association, and the Writers Guild of America, Gifford is one of the enduring voices of his generation.

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, and in particular those of Roy's adrift and disappointed mother and his hoodlum father.

In print for the first time in 15 years, " Landscape with Traveler" is the first full-length novel by Barry Gifford, laying bare the themes that have marked his lifelong career: gay issues, a winsome, Beat-inspired frenzy of love, a generation-defining crossroads in American history. Written as the protagonist's diary, and structured as three acclaimed short novels bound into one volume, the book recounts the deep friendship between a middle-aged gay man and a young straight man through vignette-like entries, all the while tracing a history of the U.S. from the 1930s through 1970s.

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.

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."