Barry Gifford

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.

"In Brando Rides Alone, poet, novelist, and screenwriter Barry Gifford sets his sights on Marlon Brando's directorial debut, One-Eyed Jacks (1961). Marlon Brando and Karl Malden fill the boots of Rio ("The Kid") and Dad Longworth in what reviewers dubbed "one of the first anti-hero Westerns." Real cowboys, ageing starlets, and a twenty-nine-year-old Stanley Kubrick complement the film's Technicolor cast of characters." "Critics strung up the movie upon its release, lambasting Brando's breezy bandit hero and lack of directorial experience, as well as the movie's violent content and melodramatic characters. Gifford offers an alternative to the critics' condescending analysis, dismissing any distinction between high and low art. He praises the film's diverse cast, beautiful coastal scenery, and epic proportions. Gifford concludes with scenes from his original western screenplay, Black Sun Rising (co-written with Sam Peckinpah crony James Hamilton), incorporating cinematic elements reminiscent of Vera Cruz, The Wild Bunch, and yes, One-Eyed Jacks."--Jacket.

xix, 458 pages : 23 cm

A collection of short stories reflecting the tragedy and turmoil underlying everyday life.

Clint Adams never saw this coming. A young girl breaks the news to him that her mother was killed— and he's her father. And the suspected murderer is about to learn that no one messes with the Gunsmith—or his offspring.

A mix of photos, stories, drawings, poems, news clippings, and ephemera gathered during a road trip along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Rudy Winston, Barry Gifford's father, ran an all-night liquor store/drugstore in Chicago, where Barry used to watch showgirls rehearse next door at the Club Alabam on Saturday afternoons. Sometimes in the morning he ate breakfast at the small lunch counter in the store, dunking doughnuts with the organ-grinder's monkey. Other times he would ride with his father to small towns in Illinois, where Rudy would meet someone while Barry waited for him in a diner. Just about anybody who was anybody in Chicago - or in Havana or in New Orleans - in the 3Os, 4Os, and 50s knew Rudy Winston. But one person who did not know him very well was his son. Rudy Winston separated from Barry's mother when Barry was eight, married again, and died when Barry was twelve. When Barry was a teenager a friend asked, "Your father was a killer, wasn't he?" The only answer to that question lies in the life that Barry lived and the powerful but elusive imprint that Rudy Winston left on it. Re-created from the scattered memories of childhood, Rudy Winston is like a character in a novel whose story can be told only by the imagination and by its effect on Barry Gifford. The Phantom Father brilliantly evokes the mystery and allure of Rudy Winston's world and the constant presence he left on his son's life. In Barry Gifford's portrait of that presence Rudy Winston is a good man to know, sometimes a dangerous man to know, and always a fascinating man.

Shocked and confused by the violence and craziness of everyday life, Esquerita Reyna, also known as Baby Cat-Face, is ill-prepared for the modern world. Living in the shadow world of New Orleans, taking spooky side trips to Mississippi and North Carolina, she struggles with the specters of love, fundamentalist religion, and extra-terrestrial activity, to name just a few. After being hijacked with a busful of other passengers and forced to watch a peculiar avant-garde dance about insects, Baby Cat-Face gives it all up and joins Mother Bizco's Temple of the Few Washed Pure by Her Blood. Her membership is jeopardized, though, when a moment of unheavenly forgetfulness entangles her with one Waldo Orchid, a grossly fat young man who has a weakness for obscure poetry during sex. The fate of Baby's unborn child is no more reassuring than hers, and his daughter's only inheritance will be the book her mother wrote: Great Women I Have Heard About But Never Met.

In this collection of three plays set in the same hotel room, award-winning novelist Barry Gifford brings his highly acclaimed writing to the theater for the first time. In "Tricks" Moe and Lou share Darlene, a hooker they pass back and forth as they exchange and appropriate each other's identities in alternating moments of confusion and revelation. In "Blackout" Danny and Diane, an Oklahoma couple of the 1930s, cannot move beyond the grief of a personal tragedy. Refusing to accept the death of her son, Diane seeks refuge in low-level deliriums. In the third play, "Mrs. Kashfi," a young boy experiences a spooky visitation while his mother voyages into the sea of clairvoyance with a fortune teller.