Best Seller
Roy's World
Paperback
$24.95
Published on Sep 22, 2020 | 720 Pages
A tie-in to the new documentary, Roy’s World, directed by Rob Christopher narrated by Lili Taylor, Matt Dillon and Willem Dafoe, these stories comprise one of Barry Gifford’s most enduring works, his homage to the gritty Chicago landscape of his youth.
Barry Gifford has been writing the story of America in acclaimed novel after acclaimed novel for the last half-century. At the same time, he’s been writing short stories, his “Roy stories,” that show America from a different vantage point, a certain mix of innocence and worldliness. Reminiscent of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Ernest Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories, Gifford’s Roy stories amount to the coming-of-age novel he never wrote, and are one of his most important literary achievements—time-pieces that preserve the lost worlds of 1950s Chicago and the American South, the landscape of postwar America seen through the lens of a boy’s steady gaze.
The twists and tragedies of the adult world seem to float by like curious flotsam, like the show girls from the burlesque house next door to Roy’s father’s pharmacy who stop by when they need a little help, or Roy’s mom and the husbands she weds and then sheds after Roy’s Jewish mobster father’s early death. Life throws Roy more than the usual curves, but his intelligence and curiosity shape them into something unforeseen, while Roy’s complete lack of self-pity allow the stories to seem to tell themselves.
Barry Gifford has been writing the story of America in acclaimed novel after acclaimed novel for the last half-century. At the same time, he’s been writing short stories, his “Roy stories,” that show America from a different vantage point, a certain mix of innocence and worldliness. Reminiscent of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Ernest Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories, Gifford’s Roy stories amount to the coming-of-age novel he never wrote, and are one of his most important literary achievements—time-pieces that preserve the lost worlds of 1950s Chicago and the American South, the landscape of postwar America seen through the lens of a boy’s steady gaze.
The twists and tragedies of the adult world seem to float by like curious flotsam, like the show girls from the burlesque house next door to Roy’s father’s pharmacy who stop by when they need a little help, or Roy’s mom and the husbands she weds and then sheds after Roy’s Jewish mobster father’s early death. Life throws Roy more than the usual curves, but his intelligence and curiosity shape them into something unforeseen, while Roy’s complete lack of self-pity allow the stories to seem to tell themselves.
Author
Barry Gifford
BARRY GIFFORD’s fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have been published in thirty languages. His novel Night People was awarded the Premio Brancati, established by Pier Paolo Pasolini and Alberto Moravia, in Italy, and he has been the recipient of the Maxwell Perkins Award and Syndicated Fiction Awards from PEN, as well as awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Library Association, the Writers Guild of America, and the Christopher Isherwood Foundation. He has also been awarded the Ingmar Bergman Chair on Cinema and Theater from the National University of Mexico. His books Sailor’s Holiday and The Phantom Father were each named a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times, and his book Wyoming was named a Novel of the Year by The Los Angeles Times. He has written librettos for operas by the composers Toru Takemitsu, Ichiro Nodaira, and Olga Neuwirth. Gifford’s work has appeared in many publications, including The New Yorker, Punch, Esquire, La Nouvelle Revue Française, El País, La Repubblica, Rolling Stone, Brick, Film Comment, El Universal, Projections, Cosmopolitan, and The New York Times. His film credits include Wild at Heart, winner of the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, Perdita Durango, Lost Highway, City of Ghosts, Ball Lightning, American Falls, and The Phantom Father. Barry Gifford’s most recent books are Sailor & Lula: The Complete Novels, The Up-Down, Imagining Paradise: New and Selected Poems, Writers, Southern Nights, Black Sun Rising / La Corazonada, and Roy’s World: Stories 1973–2020. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. For more information visit www.BarryGifford.net
Learn More about Barry Gifford
