Sad Stories Of The Death Of Kings

Description

Roy is a lover of adventure movies, a budding writer and a young man slowly coming of age without the benefit of a father. Surrounding him - for better or worse - is the adult world of post-war Chicago, a city haunted by violence, poverty and the redeeming power of the imagination. Mixing memoir with fiction, the 42 short stories in Sad Stories of the Death of Kings bring a city - and a boy's growing consciousness - to vivid, unflinching life.

The author of more than forty published works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, which have been translated into twenty-eight languages,BARRY GIFFORD began as a poet and musician. His most recent prose works areSailor & Lula- The Complete Novels,Sad Stories of the Death of Kings, andMemories from a Sinking Ship- A Novel. His most recent poetry collection isImagining Paradise- New and Selected Poems(2012). Gifford lives in the San Francisco area and maintains a website at www.barrygifford.com.

"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 ... and the more realistic, coming-of-age tales that find young innocents thrust with open eyes into a world of pain. His latest collection of stories falls squarely into the second category ... Like Gifford, [Roy] always finds the warm hearts beating beneath the sadness." -Booklist "Deliciously Giffordesque, full of sudden and swift-passing flares of insight, as if lit from within by match flame." -Jonathan Kiefer, San Francisco Weekly "Gifford's great talent captures defining moments with the casual grace of anecdote. [He] makes the anecdotal monumental." -Jonathan Keats, San Francisco Magazine "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 The Great Perhaps and Hairstyles of the Damned