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  • Published: 15 November 2013
  • ISBN: 9781609804978
  • Imprint: Seven Stories Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 432
  • RRP: $32.99

The Roy Stories




New and newly collected stories, following a beloved recurring character, from a contemporary American master with proven Hollywood mojo.

For forty 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 (Chicago, Illinois, and Key West and Miami, Florida, in particular). 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. “Nearly every Gifford story opens a Pandora’s box of uncontainable emotions,” wrote Richard Dyer in the Boston Globe. “There’s no one like Barry Gifford, which is the best reason to read him."

  • Published: 15 November 2013
  • ISBN: 9781609804978
  • Imprint: Seven Stories Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 432
  • RRP: $32.99

About the author

Barry Gifford

BARRY GIFFORD’s fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have been published in thirty languages. His novel Night People was awarded the Premio Brancati, established by Pier Paolo Pasolini and Alberto Moravia, in Italy, and he has been the recipient of the Maxwell Perkins Award and Syndicated Fiction Awards from PEN, as well as awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Library Association, the Writers Guild of America, and the Christopher Isherwood Foundation. He has also been awarded the Ingmar Bergman Chair on Cinema and Theater from the National University of Mexico. His books Sailor’s Holiday and The Phantom Father were each named a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times, and his book Wyoming was named a Novel of the Year by The Los Angeles Times. He has written librettos for operas by the composers Toru Takemitsu, Ichiro Nodaira, and Olga Neuwirth. Gifford’s work has appeared in many publications, including The New Yorker, Punch, Esquire, La Nouvelle Revue Française, El País, La Repubblica, Rolling Stone, Brick, Film Comment, El Universal, Projections, Cosmopolitan, and The New York Times. His film credits include Wild at Heart, winner of the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, Perdita Durango, Lost Highway, City of Ghosts, Ball Lightning, American Falls, and The Phantom Father. Barry Gifford’s most recent books are Sailor & Lula: The Complete Novels, The Up-Down, Imagining Paradise: New and Selected Poems, Writers, Southern Nights, Black Sun Rising / La Corazonada, and Roy’s World: Stories 1973–2020. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. For more information visit www.BarryGifford.net

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Praise for The Roy Stories

"The way Barry Gifford lets people talk articulates everything about their unfamiliar inner lives, and ours."--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

"Gifford, a master of the short story and nasty vignette, can sum up in a few words the cruely, horror, and crushing banality that shape an entire life."--New York Times Book Review

"Barry Gifford invented his own American vernacular--William Faulkner by way of B-movie film noir, porn paperbacks, and Sun Records rockabilly"--Jonathan Lethem on Sailor & Lula