Synopses & Reviews
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 violence, poverty, and the redeeming power of imagination. Here are charlatans, operators, alien abductees, schoolyard nudists, and fast girls with only months to live. At the center of it all is a boy learning to navigate the compromises, disillusionments, and regrets that come with the territory of living. Mixing memoir and fiction, the forty-one short stories in Sad Stories of the Death of Kings bring a city — and a boy's growing consciousness — to vivid, unflinching life.
Review
"A master of the vignette... Mr. Gifford also has a fine ear for dialogue.... [He] gratifyingly kisses the past without entirely telling it." Jonathan Wilson, New York Times Book Review
Review
"Gifford's great talent captures defining moments with the casual grace of anecdote. [He] makes the anecdotal monumental." Jonathan Keats, San Francisco Magazine
Review
"Roy grows up through his encounters with the melancholic detritus of life. Like Gifford, he always finds warm hearts beating beneath the sadness." Booklist
Review
"Fans of Gifford's popular Sailor and Lula novels will instantly recognize the style and substance of Sad Stories, a novel told through forty-two short stories in the life of a budding writer named Roy. The most obvious narrative anchor for Gifford is film noir, but there's a little Hemingway in his stride, a little Faulkner in his vision, and a definite smattering of Raymond Carver in his imagination." Christopher Matthew Jensen, Rain Taxi (Read the entire Rain Taxi review)
Synopsis
A vivid and unflinching portrait of a fatherless adolescent boy coming of age within the violent humanity of 1960s Chicago.
About the Author
Barry Gifford is the author of more than forty published works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, which have been translated into twenty-eight languages. His novel Wild at Heart was made into a film by David Lynch, which won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and his novel Perdita Durango was made into a feature film by Alex de la Iglesia.