Posts tagged “sailor & lula”
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A review of Barry Gifford’s work from Salon.com
February 9, 2011
“Mastering a subject and then moving on has been the story of Gifford’s life. His enormous body of work reflects a lifetime of experience and influences . . . Gifford writes about men and women of whom you ask, “Where do they go during the day?” And the answer is that they are the kind of people who always seem to show up after dark because they carry their own private night with them. You’ll be glad that you went along for the ride, but also glad that you have a kinder, saner world to return to.”
Tags: barry gifford, reviews, sailor & lula, salon.com
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89.9 WWNO talks Sailor & Lula: The Complete Novels
December 7, 2010
Take a listen to this interview, recorded April 2010, with Barry Gifford on the subject of Sailor & Lula: The Complete Novels — then check out the book!
Tags: audio, barry gifford, fiction, interviews, sailor & lula, wwno
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Sailor & Lula reviewed in the New York Review of Books
November 19, 2010
“[Gifford] is a moving target, as omnivorous as he is prolific, having published poetry, novels, story collections, memoirs, biographies of William Saroyan and Jack Kerouac, art criticism, plays, screenplays, a libretto, and nonfiction monographs about horse racing and the Chicago Cubs. Even this kind of classification is inaccurate: his history of the Cubs is really a memoir, his poems read like prose, his prose like poetry. His most remarkable achievement to date, the Sailor and Lula saga, is equally hard to pin down. . . . “Like Romeo and Juliet only nobody dies,” Gifford writes at one point, though this is, again, somewhat misleading, since by the end of the saga very few characters have been spared a gruesome and abrupt death.
Tags: barry gifford, do the blind dream, fiction, memories from a sinking ship, nathaniel rich, new york review of books, reviews, sad stories of the death of kings, sailor & lula, wyoming
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Barry Gifford interviewed in BOMB
June 22, 2010
BOMB: Sailor and Lula, by the number of appearances they’ve made in your fiction, have become a Balzac-like way to connect your fictional universe. What is it about them that won’t let you let go?
Barry Gifford: Sailor and Lula entered my life talking and perhaps they’ll never stop. After Bad Day for the Leopard Man I thought I was finished but 15 years later I wrote The Imagination of the Heart, giving Lula the last word, even though it comes from her friend Bean Thorn. Perhaps it will be. I don’t promise anything. Someone wrote once in a review about them that if a writer is lucky, characters like this come along once in a lifetime. I consider myself lucky.
Tags: barry gifford, bomb magazine, fiction, interviews, justin mcneil, sailor & lula
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Sailor & Lula reviewed at the Fiction Circus
June 4, 2010
The chapters in Sailor and Lula are all very short. Each one is only three or four pages long and usually contains a bit of insane wisdom, a murder, a kidnapping, a car bomb, a terrifying news story, or some exciting sexual perversity, like somebody masturbating with a handgun.
All these books are so fucking fun that I can’t hardly stand it. I wish Gifford’s America was real. I would buy a big car and just travel around starting fights and seducing ladies, trying to get a cool nickname. … In Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” The Killer remarks that the old woman would have been real nice if there had been someone around to kill her every day of her life. In Gifford’s South, this is never a problem. —Miracle Jones on Barry Gifford’s Sailor & Lula
Tags: barry gifford, fiction, fiction circus, miracle jones, perdita durango, sailor & lula, wild at heart
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Barry Gifford on the Bat Segundo Show
May 17, 2010
BARRY GIFFORD: I mean, in one sense, yes, we’re all subject to all of the things that have come before, to our upbringing, and to all these things that I mentioned. The key is: How do you deal with them? How do you assert yourself? How do you retain some semblance of control over your own life?
… That’s what Perdita Durango is mainly about. Now nobody had a worse childhood than Perdita Durango. She’s definitely — if anybody could be called a victimized person. It laid out her life for her. And what does she try to do? She’s trying to control her own existence. She’s fighting for her life. And that’s the theme that I always felt with Perdita. I love Perdita. I mean, she’s crazy and she’s dangerous. But I love her.
Tags: barry gifford, bat segundo, ed champion, fiction, interviews, lee ranaldo, powerhouse arena, sailor & lula
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Barry Gifford and Lee Ranaldo at Powerhouse Arena
May 17, 2010
Monday, May 17, 2010, at Powerhouse Arena, 37 Main St (between Water St & Howard Aly)
Brooklyn, NY 11201Tags: barry gifford, book reading, brooklyn, ny, powerhouse arena, sailor & lula
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Barry Gifford at Lemuria Bookstore
May 12, 2010
May 12, 2010. Lemuria Bookstore: 4465 -I-55 North. 202 Banner Hall. Jackson, MS 39206
Tags: barry gifford, book signing, jackson, lemuria bookstore, mississippi, sailor & lula
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Glyphjockey on Barry Gifford’s Sailor & Lula novels
April 30, 2010
Life is short and my reading list long (currently on my third Mary Roach in a row - currently thinking up pot puns for that review, which will be shortly) and so I don’t actively seek out amazing anymore. The wheel of karma brings it to me. My sister bought me Sailor’s Holiday (the 3rd book in the series) as a Christmas request from me. It opens up with child sacrifice, migrates to pimps harvested for their organs and encounters with conjectured afterlife. Amplified from the original Wild at Heart, (the first book) and yet with the Gifford flavor all along; life’s mundane moments inherently contain enough reflectivity for him to provide insights.
Tags: barry gifford, fiction, glyphjockey, reviews, sailor & lula
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Barry Gifford at PEN
April 29, 2010
April 29, 2010, 7–8:30 p.m. PEN EVENT at the Jack H. Skirball Center for the Performing Arts at NYU, 566 LaGuardia Place (at Washington Square South), New York City
Tags: barry gifford, bowery Poetry Club, NYU, PEN American Center, sailor & lula
