Background
Gifford, Barry Colby was born on October 18, 1946 in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Son of Adolph Edward Stein and Dorothy Marjorie Colby.
("Everything I have to say about race and religion and pol...)
"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 helpings of poetry, journalism, and a new interview with the author. The broad contours of an episodic output emerge—a full-length view of the freaks and freakish incidents that populate Gifford’s unique human comedy. A world, as Lula, the author’s favorite of all his characters, reflects, "wild at heart and weird on top." The Rooster Trapped in the Reptile Room provides essential reading for anyone after the soul of American writing.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1583225250/?tag=2022091-20
(Reminiscent of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Ernest H...)
Reminiscent 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’s steady gaze. Like Twain’s Mississippi River and Hemingway’s Big Two-Hearted, Gifford’s Chicago, New Orleans, and the highways and byways between offer us mesmerizing lives lost in the kaleidoscope of postwar America, in particular those of Roy’s adrift and disappointed mother and his hoodlum father.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1583228756/?tag=2022091-20
( As author Barry Gifford was writing these pieces, he gr...)
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 conceived the device of The Ropedancer when I was in Veracruz, Mexico, at a hotel much like the Hotel Los Regalos de Dios, where the former funambulist, whom I call The Ropedancer, took up residence following the demise of the Dancing Ciegas, who plunged to their deaths from a high wire.” Many of these stories are tragic, some humorous, but all told by individuals in the confessional mode which is often the posture assumed by persons adrift in a foreign land and who find themselves not uncomfortably in conversation late at night with a stranger.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1560258071/?tag=2022091-20
( The author of Wild at Heart and The Wild Life of Sailor...)
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 confront the chaotic horror of the United States at the end of the twentieth century.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/080213369X/?tag=2022091-20
Gifford, Barry Colby was born on October 18, 1946 in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Son of Adolph Edward Stein and Dorothy Marjorie Colby.
(Reminiscent of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Ernest H...)
( The author of Wild at Heart and The Wild Life of Sailor...)
( As author Barry Gifford was writing these pieces, he gr...)
("Everything I have to say about race and religion and pol...)
Married Mary Louise Gifford, October 23, 1970. Children: Phoebe, Asa Colby.