Album Notes

A new novel from the author of Wild at Heart…

MEMORIES FROM A SINKING SHIP
By Barry Gifford

Winner of the Christopher Isherwood Foundation Prize for Fiction in 2006.

A Double-CD Audiobook

Selections from the novel
read by the author
with original music by Oscar Bucher


“Like Hemingway, Saroyan, Kerouac, Salinger, Brautigan and Bukowski, Gifford has a style. He is a great comic realist who does with the turn of a phrase what a Zen master does with a brushstroke.”
—Andrei Codrescu

"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."
—Armistead Maupin

"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

“Gifford’s people are pure American; pure in their madness, in their evil; and to read about, pure pleasure.”
—Alan Cheuse, Nationa Public Radio


"Barry Gifford is a great writer, may Heaven and all help him, consequently."
—William Saroyan


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MEMORIES FROM A SINKING SHIP recounts a uniquely American childhood and adolescence through a boy’s travels with his mother and ailing gangster father, as well as adventures with neighborhood characters such as The Viper, The Pharaoh and Skull Dorfman. Similar in structure and tone to Ernest Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories and those in Nelson Algren’s The Neon Wilderness, Barry Gifford’s MEMORIES cuts to the heart and the bone. “Nearly every Gifford story opens a Pandora’s box of uncontainable emotions,” wrote Richard Dyer in the Boston Globe. “There’s no one like Barry Gifford, which is the best reason to read him.”

Set against the backdrop of 1950s and ’60s Chicago, the Florida Keys, and New Orleans, Gifford’s Memories conjures up an intimate portrait of an America that no longer exists. Read by the author, this two-disc collection contains 25 compelling tales from the novel with evocative original music by Oscar Bucher. A selection of these stories was awarded the Christopher Isherwood Foundation Prize for Fiction in 2006.


“If you bemoan the lack of something different in your fiction, the search is over.”
—Andrew Vachss, The Chicago Tribune

“Barry Gifford was, is, and always shall be an America Original.”
—Richard Price



Barry Gifford’s books have been translated into 28 languages. He has also written or co-written numerous films, including Lost Highway, City of Ghosts and Perdita Durango. David Lynch’s film Wild at Heart, based on Gifford’s novel, won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1990. For more information, visit www.BarryGifford.com