Memories From A Sinking Ship

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Description

In an episodic novel, Barry Gifford lays bare his young heart, exploring the hopes and disappointments of his childhood and adolescence. He recounts his travels with his mother, spent considering the intersection of the landscape and their lives, and an ailing gangster father, who influences his son's life through his absence. Memories From a Sinking Ship conjures an era - the late 1940s through to the early 1960s - and places - Chicago, the Florida Keys, New Orleans - to which one can never return.

Reviews

This novel is so exquisitely structured and Gifford's story so engaging that it surrounds the reader and the characters, tying us to them with rapid transitions and rich embroidery. More, there is a persistent rhythm to it all, a constant throbbing like a train in motion or the beating of a heart, that permeates this work and brings the individual episodes into harmony that makes this collection of scenes into a novel. Review of Contemporary Fiction

Gifford cuts right through to the heart of what makes a good novel readable and entertaining. The way Barry Gifford does it, it's high art. Elmore Leonard

Author Bio

The author of more than forty works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, which have been translated into over twenty-five languages,BARRY GIFFORDwrites distinctly American stories for readers around the globe. From screenplays and librettos to his acclaimed Sailor and Lula novels, Giffords writing is as distinctive as it is difficult to classify. Born in the Seneca Hotel on Chicagos Near North Side, he relocated in his adolescence to New Orleans. The move proved significant: throughout his career, Giffords fictionpart-noir, part-picaresque, always entertainingis born of the clash between what he has referred to as his Northern Side and Southern Side. Gifford has been recipient of awards from PEN, the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Library Association, the Writers Guild of America and the Christopher Isherwood Foundation. His novelWild at Heartwas adapted into the 1990 Palme dOr-winning film of the same name. Gifford lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.