The Cuban Club

Description

A masterpiece of mood and setting, character and remembrance, The Cuban Club is Barry Gifford's ultimate coming-of-age story told as sixty-four linked tales. Set in Chicago in the 1950s and early 1960s against the backdrop of small-time hoodlums in the Chicago mob and the girls and women attached to them, there is the nearness of heinous crimes, and the price to be paid for them. To Roy and his friends, these twists and tragedies drift by like curious flotsam. The tales themselves are koan-like, often ending in questions, with rarely a conclusion.

BARRY GIFFORD is the author of more than forty published works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, which have been translated into twenty-eight languages. His most recent prose works are The Up-Down, Writers, Sailor & Lula- The Complete Novels, Sad Stories of the Death of Kings, Imagining Paradise- New and Selected Poems, The Roy Stories, and Landscape with Traveler. Gifford lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. More at www.barrygifford.com.

"What Gifford does with just a few pages is nothing short of magical. These very short stories straddle innocence and experience, good and evil. His tales are always dense with information, yet register with dreamlike intensity and have the resonance of an epiphany." -Jim Ruland, author of Forest of Fortune "The Cuban Club is masterfully written, cinematic and personal. [It] captures the timeliness of loneliness and longing." -Kate Burns, New City Lit