The Roy Stories

“Complete with road trips, baseball lore and local yarns, The Roy Stories is as American as apple pie and the punks that nabbed it from your windowsill.” —Time Out New York

“Gifford, a master of the short story and nasty vignette, can sum up in a few words the cruelty, horror, and crushing banality that shape an entire life.” —The New York Times Book Review 

“The way Barry Gifford lets people talk articulates everything about their unfamiliar inner lives, and ours.” —The Boston Globe
 
“Gifford is a master.” —Los Angeles Times
 
“Gifford cuts right through 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 invented his own American vernacular–William Faulkner by way of B-movie film noir, porn paperbacks, and Sun Records rockabilly” —Jonathan Lethem

“Gifford is an anomaly in both his influence and recognition. His prose is as straightforward as it is avant-garde, and can turn an ashtray into a flower petal right there on the page.” —Sarah Wambold, Arts and Entertainment
 
“Like Hemingway, Saroyan, Kerouac, and Salinger… Gifford has a style. He is a great comic realist who does with the turn of a phrase what a Zen master does with a brushstroke. Gifford is an original who has seized the still-live vein of that American realism which began with Mark Twain.” —Andrei Codrescu, National Public Radio