Southern Nights: Night People, Arise and Walk, Baby Cat Face

(Paperback)

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A collection of three of Gifford's wildest and weirdest Southern gothic novels Barry Gifford's three Southern Gothic novels, Night People, Arise and Walk, and Baby Cat-Face, may be among the weirdest and best of Gifford's novels for their sheer velocity--the copious, raw violence; the invented religions and gods that make people do things; and how the horrors somehow cohabit--affably--with the genuine pathos and loveliness of the unforgettable characters that live in these books and the things they say so easily that we've never heard anyone say before. God in these Southern Nights is only another possibly deranged near relative, cast in the only nonspeaking part in this human drama. Everyone else talks and talks. And it's the dialogue in these novels that make them some of Gifford's best, reminders of the author's seemingly unlimited range and versatility, a comic-tragic genius for our time. As a character in Night People says, "Safety first ain't never been my motto."

Reviews

"Barry Gifford is a killer fuckin' writer and I have a lot of respect for him. His writing is pure and minimal and it sparks things and gets your imagination going. ... Barry's got these characters and they're not going to be doctors or lawyers, but they're smart and they live in a kind of subterranean culture, and I really love that world and the things that can happen there. It's wild and free and there's a kind of fearlessness, yet there's also some kind of deep understanding of life." David Lynch, in his autobiographyRoom to Dream

"The three short novels inSouthern Nights, comprised ofNight People,Arise & Walk, andBaby Cat-Facewill leave you awake at night, pulse racing, double-taking the shadows for Giffords people.These novels are a howling freight train, lit up and pummeling full blast into the darkness. While reading them, I kept thinking of Flannery OConnor, Barry Hannah, and William Gay: southern writers unafraid of depicting violence, the grotesque, the worst in the human heart." Ellis Purdie, Jackson Clarion Ledger

"Barry Gifford is one of the great American writers... up there with Patricia Highsmith and Raymond Carver... Anyone who flits between quoting Tuesday Weld and Roland Barthes at the start of his stories is a good man, and when chapters start with transsexual Cuban bartenders offering free drinks to whoever would play 'Lookin for a Love' by The Valentinos, then you know you're in the presence of a beauty itself rareno matter how mad the company is." John Carney, Tangents (UK)

Author Bio

BARRY GIFFORD is the author of more than forty published works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, which have been translated into thirty languages. His most recent books include The Cuban Club- Stories, The Up-Down- a novel, Writers, Sailor & Lula- The Complete Novels, Sad Stories of the Death of Kings, Imagining Paradise- New and Selected Poems, The Roy Stories, and Landscape with Traveler--all from Seven Stories. He lives in the San Francisco Bay area. More at w.w.w.barrygifford.net.