Jack’s Book $35.00
New York: St. Martin’s Press (1978)
Spotting on top of pages. Otherwise a good copy in dust jacket.
Hotel Room Trilogy $50.00
Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi (1995)
One of 500 copies signed by the author. Near fine in dust jacket.
A Good Man to Know $50.00
Livingston, Montana: Clark City Press (1992)
Near fine in dust jacket.
Rudy Winston was a good man to know in South-Side Chicago in the thirties, forties and fifties, and Barry Gifford brings him to life from three very different points of view: through the eyes of his son, through obituaries and news stories, and through an FBI report on a caper called the “Gulf Coast Bank Sneak.” A Good Man to Know is most memorable for its child’s vision of events, some mundane, others unsettling: mysterious roadtrips, a death at a baseball game, a search for alligators in Florida, a mother’s penchant for fortune-tellers.
Arise and Walk $35.00
New York: Hyperion (1994)
Near fine in dust jacket.
In this colorful, modern tale of American madness, a group of misfits in New Orleans is bent on improving the world and altering the universe. From churches to TV channels, they hand out hope as they redefine righteousness.
New Mysteries of Paris $400.00
Livingston, Montana: Clark City Press (1991)
One of 26 numbered copies signed by the author. Russell Chatham print signed and numbered (1 of 26) laid in. The book is burgundy cloth in a marbled burgundy slipcase.
Night People $45.00
New York: Grove (1992)
Fine in dust jacket.
This road map of the American nightmare is composed of four related novellas. Night People reaches even deeper into the vision of our world that Barry Gifford has planted in earlier novels, and its pure light is often shocking. Yet no matter how odd, innocent, evil, or downright unearthly his characters are, Gifford dives into their souls, finds the truth of their lives, and delivers it to us with the energy and economy of a Picasso ink drawing.
Memories From a Sinking Ship $21.95
New York, NY: Seven Stories Press (2007)
Near fine in dust jacket.
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.
Wild at Heart $50.00
New York, NY: Grove (1990)
Near fine in dust jacket.
“Barry Gifford is a stylist in the manner of Tom McGuane and Joy Williams, with the heart of Raymond Carver; Gifford’s sense of life takes him back to life itself as it is lived now. Wild At Heart is a totally engrossing novel, and I will tell that to everyone I know.” — Jim Harrison
Do the Blind Dream? $21.95
New York, NY: Seven Stories Press (2004)
Near fine in dust jacket.
Depicting the tender inner lives of the characters, two novellas and 11 stories are offered from the master of violent American satire.
The Sinaloa Story $35.00
New York: Harcourt (1998)
Near fine in dust jacket.
Out of a brothel in the border town of La Paz, Arizona, Ava Varazo works her way up to Indio Desacato, a rich racketeer from Sinaloa, Texas. Enamored of Ava, Desacato has asked her to be the queen of his own house, bragging that he never keeps less than half a million dollars in cash at his mansion. The setup is perfect for a double cross, and Ava enlists the help of DelRay Mudo, another of her admirers. Even DelRay can guess that more than one trap can be sprung on this hunt, but he can’t forget Ava, and his life doesn’t offer much else other than following her. Caught between the disappointments of their past and their dreams of the future, the not-quite-lovers of “The Sinaloa Story,” like the rest of us, fight to survive what life has given them.
The Imagination of the Heart $22.95
New York, NY: Seven Stories Press (2009)
Near fine in dust jacket.
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.
American Falls $45.00
New York: Seven Stories Press (2002)
Fine in dust jacket.
The stories in this collection range in period, style, and theme from the 1950s to the present, from absurdist to romantic, from childhood innocence to murder and revenge. In the title story, a Japanese American motel owner chooses not to betray a total stranger wanted for murder when the police come looking for him. In the novella The Lonely and the Lost, a small towns inhabitants solve their problems as best they can until it comes time for the devil to reap what they have sown. Weaving dark and light, sinister and comic, award-winning author Gifford writes about people America has given up for lost.
Sailor’s Holiday $50.00
New York: Knopf (1991)
Near fine in Random House decorated wrapper.
The Cavalry Charges $25.95
New York, NY: Thunder’s Mouth Press (2007)
Near fine in dust jacket.
Barry Gifford’s diverse interests, varied influences, wide travels, and multitudinous acquaintances have fueled his prolific writing career. In a series of anecdotal reflections, Gifford relates many of the key experiences that shaped him as a writer . . . Part memoir, part literary criticism, part free rumination on life and experience–The Calvary Charges is a treasure trove of wisdom and insight.
The Stars Above Veracruz $24.00
New York, NY: Thunder’s Mouth Press (2006)
Near fine in dust jacket.
As author Barry Gifford was writing these pieces, he gradually came to realize that what he was creating was a geographical fiction, or a geography of fictions. As Barry explains, “Everybody has a story, no matter where they are in the world, and I conceived the device of The Ropedancer when I was in Veracruz, Mexico, at a hotel much like the Hotel Los Regalos de Dios, where the former funambulist, whom I call The Ropedancer, took up residence following the demise of the Dancing Ciegas, who plunged to their deaths from a high wire.”
Many of these stories are tragic, some humorous, but all told by individuals in the confessional mode which is often the posture assumed by persons adrift in a foreign land and who find themselves not uncomfortably in conversation late at night with a stranger.
An Unfortunate Woman $95.00
San Francisco: Creative Arts (1984)
Near fine in dust jacket.
An examination of one woman’s life, An Unfortunate Woman is the intimate story of Peggy McCloud, told according to the terms of the poet Muriel Rukeyser’s challenge: “What would happen if one woman/told the truth about her life?/The world would split open.”
The Roy Stories $30.00
New York: Seven Stories Press (2013)
Fine in decorated wrappers.
For forty years—a Biblical time span—The Roy Stories has been the one continuous unbroken line in the otherwise kaleidoscopic career of one of America’s greatest living writers. Collected here for the first time, the Roy stories of Barry Gifford chronicle his personal history of a time—roughly, the late 1940s through the early 1960s—and a place—the southern and mid-western United States (Chicago, Illinois, and Key West and Miami, Florida, in particular). Similar in structure and tone to Ernest Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories, Barry Gifford’s slices of life cut to the heart and the bone. “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.”
Baby Cat-Face $30.00
New York, NY: Harcourt (1995)
Near fine in dust jacket.
Gifford’s latest installment in his chronicle of American madness and desperation on the eve of the 21st century. Ill prepared for the modern world’s sharp jolts, Baby Cat-Face joins Mother Bizco’s Temple of the Few Washed Pure by Her Blood, only to learn that there is no easy path to virtue. Baby Cat-Face deals with love and a specter of extraterrestrial activity.
Wednesday January 28, 2015
Signing 5:00
Reading: 5:30
The Up-Down $23.95
New York, NY: Seven Stories Press (2015) As new in dust jacket.