Do the Blind Dream?

by GIFFORD, BARRY

• ISBN13: 9781583226353
• ISBN10: 1583226354
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-04-06
• Publisher: Seven Stories Press

Summary

"I love Do the Blind Dream?-a wonderful and delightful piece that tastes of Bunuel and Cocteau."-Pedro Almodovar The two new novellas and 11 stories in Do the Blind Dream? are Barry Gifford's most mature works of fiction to date. Almost a quarter of a century ago, Armistead Maupin wrote that "Barry Gifford is all the proof the world will ever need that a writer who listens with his heart is capable of telling anyone's story." Yet only now does Gifford's sense of the American psyche converge with our own. In contrast to his often nightmarish, satirical, groundbreaking novels of the 1990s, Wild at Heart, Perdita Durango, and Night People, Do the Blind Dream? dazzles by how it depicts the tender inner lives of the characters and the raging contradictions of their outer realities. In the title novella, members of an Italian family gather for their mother's funeral and confront how the sins of their father have cursed in some way each of their own troubled lives. In the story "Ball Lightning," a chance encounter at a gas station reunites a sister and brother, leading only to inexplicable tragedy. One of America's very finest and most accomplished writers of fiction, Barry Gifford is the author of the novels Wild at Heart, Perdita Durango and Night People. His most recent books include The Phantom Father, a New York Times notable Book of the Year; Wyoming, a Los Angeles Times Novel of the Year; American Falls, his collected short stories; and The Rooster Trapped in the Reptile Room: A Barry Gifford Reader. He also cowrote the film Lost Highway (1997) with David Lynch, and co-wrote with director Matt Dillon the film City of Ghosts (2003). His essays and stories have appeared in Punch, Esquire, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, and El Pais, among other publications. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Author Biography

The author of more than forty works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, which have been translated into over twenty-five languages, BARRY GIFFORD writes distinctly American stories for readers around the globe. From screenplays and librettos to his acclaimed Sailor and Lula novels, Gifford’s writing is as distinctive as it is difficult to classify. Born in the Seneca Hotel on Chicago’s Near North Side, he relocated in his adolescence to New Orleans. The move proved significant: throughout his career, Gifford’s fiction—part-noir, part-picaresque, always entertaining—is 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 novel Wild at Heart was adapted into the 1990 Palme d’Or-winning film of the same name. Gifford lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Table of Contents

Do the Blind Dream?	p. 1
Ball Lightning	p. 41
The Cine	p. 67
The Lost Tribe	p. 71
Johnny Across	p. 75
Forever After	p. 81
Rosa Blanca	p. 85
African Adventure Story	p. 91
Havana Moon	p. 95
Holiday from Women	p. 197
Life Is Like This Sometimes	p. 203
A Day's Worth of Beauty	p. 207
The Peterson Fire	p. 211
Books by Barry Gifford	p. 214
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