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The author of more than forty works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, which have been translated into over twenty-five languages, BARRY GIFFORD writes distinctly American stories for readers around the globe. From screenplays and librettos to his acclaimed Sailor and Lula novels, Gifford’s writing is as distinctive as it is difficult to classify. Born in the Seneca Hotel on Chicago’s Near North Side, he relocated in his adolescence to New Orleans. The move proved significant: throughout his career, Gifford’s fiction—part-noir, part-picaresque, always entertaining—is born of the clash between what he has referred to as his “Northern Side” and “Southern Side.” Gifford has been recipient of awards from PEN, the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Library Association, the Writers Guild of America and the Christopher Isherwood Foundation. His novel Wild at Heart was adapted into the 1990 Palme d’Or-winning film of the same name. Gifford lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Barry Gifford's Sad Stories of the Death of Kings gleams like a stolen silver dollar; one boy's search for wisdom among the hustlers, criminals, and wise guys that reads as evocatively as anything out of Nelson Algren. These stories, sometimes only a page or two, riddled with sharp, subtle dialogue, all glow with the devastating, sometimes gruesome wisdom of Sherwood Anderson and Flannery O'Connor. --Joe Meno, author of Hairstyles of the Damned Roy grows up through his encounters with the melancholic detritus of life. Like Gifford, he always finds the warm hearts beating beneath the sadness. -- Booklist --Gifford's work falls into two camps: the edgy, wildly eccentric stories, full of weirdness and perversity but portraying characters who exude a bedrock humanity (Arise and Walk, 1994, or Baby-Cat Face, 1995), and the more realistic, coming-of age tales that find young innocents thrust with open eyes into a world of pain (Wild at Heart, 1989, and the semi-documentary fictional memoir A Good Man to Know, 1992).His latest collection of stories falls squarely into the second category. Like A Good Man to Know, it takes place in Chicago in the 1950s and draws heavily on Gifford's youth. Most of the stories feature a young teenager, Roy, observing the troubled lives of the people he sees in his meanderings around the city. Whether it's a washed-up fighter with whom Roy plays chess, or a tired stripper who counsels him not to end up like these bums come into this dive don't do nuthin' but tell each other sad stories of the death of kings, Roy grows up through his encounters with the melancholic detritus of life. Like Gifford, he always finds the warm hearts beating beneath the sadness.-- Bill Ott --
