UNITED STATES AUTHOR · FICTION · GENERAL
Barry Gifford
Barry Gifford (born October 18, 1946, in Chicago, Illinois) is an American author, poet, and screenwriter known for his distinctive mix of American landscapes and prose influenced by film noir and Beat Generation writers. Gifford writes nonfiction, poetry, and is best known for his series of novels about Sailor and Lula, two star-crossed protagonists on a perpetual road trip.
I saw a brand-new woman's shoe lying in the middle of a quite Honolulu intersection.
— from An unfortunate woman, 1984
Most acclaimed
Wyoming
1979
"A woman and her young son are traveling together by car through the southern and mid-western United States in the mid-to-late 1950s. As the mother drives, she and the boy, Roy, talk about their lives, their disappointments, and their dreams. "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. Told entirely in dialogue, the story of Roy and his mother traverses both real and imaginary states of being, on a tour through an uncertain but hopeful landscape of longing and myth. As Roy's mother tells him, "Everybody needs Wyoming.""--BOOK JACKET.
An unfortunate woman
1984
"An Unfortunate Woman assumes the form of a traveler's journal, chronicling the protagonist's journey and his oblique ruminations on the suicide of one woman and the death from cancer of another, a close friend.". "After Richard Brautigan committed suicide, his only child, Ianthe Brautigan, found among his possessions the manuscript of An Unfortunate Woman. It had been completed more than a year earlier but was still unpublished at the time of his death. Finding it too painful to face his presence on page after page, she put the manuscript aside.". "Years later, having completed a memoir about her father's life and death, Ianthe Brautigan reread An Unfortunate Woman and now, clear-eyed, she saw that it was Richard Brautigan's work at its best, and that it had to be published."--BOOK JACKET.
The Cuban club
A masterpiece of mood and setting, character and remembrance, The Cuban Club is Barry Gifford's ultimate coming-of-age story told as sixty-four 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 '60s 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. One story, a letter from Roy to his father four years after his father's death, is written as if the older man 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 ageless eyes of a seer 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 gathering to himself the romance of a world that teeters on catastrophe always, even as it abounds in saving graces.