Barry Gifford

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Barry Gifford's Latest Book

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  • Bibliography:
    36 Books
  • First Book:
    January 1976
  • Latest Book:
    April 2024
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Book List in Order: 36 titles

  • My Mother's People

  • Francis goes to the seashore

    • / General Fiction
    • Buy Buy

    First Edition - 1st Printing - 1982 - dust jacket price not clipped - dust jacket has little shelf wear - no marks or tears in the book. Tight binding. Barry Gifford's sequel to Landscape with Traveler....

  • An Unfortunate Woman

  • Wild at Heart

    This volume comprises six interlocking novels which chart the wild lives of star-crossed lovers Sailor Ripley and Lula Pace Fortune. The bizarre and varied characters of the stories inhabit a surreal world where paradoxes abound....

  • Port Tropique

    Revolution is simmering in the heat of battered Central American town Port Tropique, where protagonist Franz Hall is an "intellectual Meursault in a paranoid Hemingway landscape, a self-conscious Conradian adventurer, a Lord Jim in the earliest stage...

  • Sailor's Holiday

    Five interconnected novellas--"59 and Raining," "Sailor's Holiday," "The Sultans of Africa," "Consuelo's Kiss," and "Bad Day for the Leopard Man"--relate the adventures of Sailor Ripley and Lula Pace Fortune, two eccentric Southern lovers...

  • New Mysetries of Paris

    As The Los Angeles Times wrote, New Mysteries of Paris is "not so much stories as character sketches, artfully drawn, as though told by people very close to their subjects - the narrator of Andra Breton's Nadja, a companion of King Farouk, the painte...

  • 59 Degrees and Raining

  • Good Man to Know

    Rudy Winston was a good man to know in South-Side Chicago in the thirties, forties and fifties, and Barry Gifford brings him to life from three very different points of view: through the eyes of his son, through obituaries and news stories, and throu...



  • Landscape with Traveler

    Landscape with Traveler: The Pillow Book of Francis Reeves is Barry Gifford’s first full-length novel. In print for the first time in fifteen years, Landscape with Traveler is written as the protagonist's diary -- inspired by the first century Japa...

  • Night People

    The author of Wild at Heart and The Wild Life of Sailor and Lula writes of what Tennessee Williams called "something wild in the country/that only the night people know.” He draws his characters from the shadows of the Deep South, where they confr...

  • Arise and Walk

  • Baby Cat-Face

    From the author of Wild at Heart, a “wild, wacky, funny, well-written, and surreal” novel (Kansas City Star) about a woman struggling to make her way in “a New Orleans so feverishly peculiar that Anne Rice would feel at ease there” (Washingto...

  • Perdita Durango

  • The Sinaloa Story

    The Sinaloa Story tells of DelRay Mudo and Ava Varazo, two down-and-outs looking for a reasonable life and maybe even a little redemption in a corrupt and violent world. Ava is a Mexican prostitute, beautiful and no victim of circumstance. When DelRa...

  • My Last Martini

  • American Falls: The Collected Short Stories

    American Falls is the first major collection of short stories from Barry Gifford, master of the dark side of the American reality. These stories range widely in style and period, from the 1950s to the present, from absurdist exercises to romantic tal...

  • The Rooster Trapped in the Reptile Room: A Barry Gifford Reader

    "Everything I have to say about race and religion and politics is in the novels," declares Barry Gifford. The Rooster Trapped in the Reptile Room gathers generous portions of all thirteen novels and novellas, as well as first-person essays, generous ...

  • The Wild Life of Sailor and Lula

    Featuring the novels: Wild at Heart, Perdita Durango, Sailor's Holiday, Sultans of Africa, Consuelo's Kiss and Bad Day for the Leopard Man

    The Wild Life of Sailor and Lula presents Gifford's best prose work as he originally conceived it: si...



  • Wyoming

    A subtle, impeccably rendered new novel from one of America's most distinctive writers.A woman and her young son are traveling together by car through the southern and midwestern United States in the mid-to-late 1950s. As the mother drives, she and t...

  • The Stars above Veracruz

    As author Barry Gifford was writing these pieces, he gradually came to realize that what he was creating was a geographical fiction, or a geography of fictions. As Barry explains, “Everybody has a story, no matter where they are in the world, and I...

  • The Imagination of the Heart

    The Imagination of the Heart is the final chapter in the saga of Sailor Ripley and Lula Pace Fortune, the "Romeo and Juliet of the Deep South." Their story began in Barry Gifford's novel Wild at Heart, which in 1990 was made into a Palme d'Or"winni...

  • Memories from a Sinking Ship

    Winner of the 2007 Christopher Isherwood Foundation Award for FictionReminiscent of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Ernest Hemingway's Nick Adams stories, Memories from a Sinking Ship travels the landscape of a turbulent world seen through a boy’...

  • Sailor & Lula

    On the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Barry Gifford's international bestseller, Wild at Heart, as well as the anniversary of the Palme d'Or"winning film adaptation by director David Lynch, Sailor & Lula: The Complete Novels present...

  • Sad Stories of the Death of Kings

    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 -- whether to support him or to drag him under -- is the adult world of postwar Chicago, a city haunted by vio...

  • The Roy Stories

    Barry Gifford has been writing gritty, American tales for the past forty years. His novels, stories, poetry, and films have helped shape the American neo-noir genre. The New York Times Book Review says that he "can sum up in a few words the cruelty, ...

  • The Up-Down

    A novel of violence, of love, and introspection, The Up-Down follows a man who leaves home and all that’s familiar, finds true love, loses it, and finds it again. Pace’s voyage is outward, among strangers, and inward into the fifth direction that...

  • Writers: 13 Vignettes

    In Writers, great American storyteller Barry Gifford paints portraits of famous writers caught in imaginary vulnerable moments in their lives. In prose that is funny, grotesque, and a touch brutal, Gifford shows these writers at their most human, whi...

  • The Cuban Club

    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, a creation myth of The Fall as seen through the eyes of an innocent boy on the cusp of becom...



  • Southern Nights

    God in these Southern Nights is only another possibly deranged near relative, cast in the only nonspeaking part in this human drama. Everyone else talks and talks. And it's the dialogue in these novels that makes them three of Gifford' best, reminder...

  • Sailor & Lula: The Complete Novels

    "The Romeo and Juliet of the South" are back in this new edition of the internationally best-selling Sailor and Lula novels, now including for the first time the culminating novel, The Up-Down, by American master Barry Gifford.

    "Barry Gifford ...

  • Roy's World: Stories: 1973-2020

    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 yout...

  • Black Sun Rising // La Corazonada

    The first Western noir by Barry Gifford, "a killer f****n' writer." (David Lynch)Based on historical events in 1851, this Western noir novella traces the struggle of the first integrated Native American tribe to establish themselves on the North Amer...

  • The Boy Who Ran Away to Sea

    A childhood in the 1950s and ‘60s among grifters, show girls, and mob enforcers who embraced the boy and made him who he is.“These stories make for one of the most important and moving American bildungsromans of all time.” -- William Boyle, Th...

  • Writers

    In Writers, great American storyteller Barry Gifford paints portraits of famous writers caught in imaginary vulnerable moments in their lives. In prose that is funny, grotesque, and a touch brutal, Gifford shows these writers at their most human, whi...

  • Ghost Years

    A tribute to the author's mother Kitty, the gritty Chicago landscape of his youth, and the "ghost years, that time in your life you don't know won't never come again." Barry Gifford has been writing the story of America in acclaimed novel afte...

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Barry Gifford has published 36 books.

Barry Gifford does not have a new book coming out soon. The latest book, Ghost Years, was published in April 2024.

The first book by Barry Gifford, My Mother's People, was published in January 1976.

No. Barry Gifford does not write books in series.
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