The Roy Stories

Description

For 40 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. 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.

BARRY GIFFORD was born in Chicago in 1946. The author of more than forty published works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, which have been translated into twenty-eight languages, Gifford began as a poet and musician. His most recent prose works are Sailor & Lula- The Complete Novels, Sad Stories of the Death of Kings, and Memories from a Sinking Ship- A Novel. His most recent poetry collection is Imagining Paradise- New and Selected Poems (2012). Gifford lives in the San Francisco area and maintains a website at www.barrygifford.com.

"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