Sailor & Lula: The Complete Novels
"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'sA 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