Synopses & Reviews
“I saw Sailor and Lula in love in the middle of a crazy, violent, wild world, and I wanted to go on that trip with them. . . . It’s like looking into the Garden of Eden before things went bad.”—David Lynch
“A dark and comic ride through a fantasy America that rings desperately true.”—The New York Times Book Review
“Gifford sketches marvelous characters as deftly as William Faulkner and animates them in scene after scene of hilarious dialogue. . . . Barry Gifford continues to be one of America’s most original writers.”—Playboy
On the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Barry Gifford’s international bestseller Wild at Heart, as well as on the anniversary of the Cannes Palme d’Or–winning film adaptation by director David Lynch, Sailor & Lula: The Complete Novels presents all seven of the novels and novellas that comprise the saga of Sailor Ripley and Lula Pace Fortune, “the Romeo and Juliet of the South”: Wild at Heart, Perdita Durango (also made into a feature film), Sailor’s Holiday, Sultans of Africa, Consuelo’s Kiss, Bad Day for the Leopard Man, and The Imagination of the Heart.
The author of more than forty published works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry that have been translated into twenty-eight languages, Barry Gifford is one of the few contemporary American writers whose characters are familiar to audiences around the world. Gifford lives in the San Francisco Bay area.
Review
"Barry Gifford invented his own American vernacular William Faulkner by way of B-movie film noir, porn paperbacks, and Sun Records rockabilly to forge the stealth-epic of Sailor & Lula. His accomplishment looks more and more like one of the permanent glories of recent storytelling, a set of crude masterpieces like Philip Guston's late paintings. The compression and verve on view on every page of this compendium is as irresistible and dizzying as a dish of brandy-filled chocolates forged in shapes of pistols, hangmen's ropes, convertible automobiles, and unclad, steamy bodies, daring you to keep gobbling them up."Jonathan Lethem
"The way Barry Gifford lets people talk articulates everything about their unfamiliar inner lives, and ours."Boston Globe
"True love never dies. It just gets cooler, in every sense, icing up under the dueling infirmities of age and memory like an overworked and sweating air conditioner propped haphazardly in the paint-peeling window of one of those random, boxy shotgun shacks that dot the miles of nowheresville leading into the parish of Orleans. There are precious few literary landscapes where this particular sort of true romance burns as hot and sweet and altogether cool as in Gifford's sprawling, epically Southern gothic novels featuring lanky ex-con Sailor Ripley and his beloved blond muse of the Deep South's bloody two-lane blacktop, Lula Pace Fortune."Austin Chronicle
"An epic story about real love persisting through every manifestation of America's slow apocalypse, writing a real masterpiece of salt and sage that sweats off the page like an auto mechanic dripping hair grease into your soup... 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."Fiction Circus
"Barry Gifford’s fiction follows characters through numerous dark alleys and grimy, disreputable backwaters. David Lynch has said that reading these novels is, like looking into the Garden of Eden before things went bad.” Bad, here, being a relative term."Bomb Blog
Synopsis
Celebrating the twentieth anniversary of Wild at Heart, all seven novels together in one volume.
Synopsis
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 presents all of the novels and novellas that comprise the saga of Sailor Ripley and Lula Pace Fortune, "the Romeo and Juliet of the South": Wild at Heart, Perdita Durango (also made into a feature film), Sailors Holiday, Sultans of Africa, Consuelos Kiss, Bad Day for the Leopard Man, and The Imagination of the Heart.
About the Author
The author of more than forty published works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, which have been translated into more than twenty-five languages, Barry Gifford is one of the few contemporary American writers whose characters are familiar to audience around the world. Gifford lives in the San Francisco Bay area.