The Wild Life Of Sailor And Lula
- 18 Sep 2003
- 9781841954349
- £16.99
- 528 pp
- 130×197mm
has all the narrative nuances that have made his style synonymous with David Lynch's: the eclectic sound track, the freak-show cast of ageing and raging odd-balls, and the fractured dialogue between personal dreams and kitsch, accidental cultural guardians - it's the novel's unfilmable inner stories that propel it so speedily into the reader's fascination
Gifford is a brilliant writer - a hard-boiled stylist with a soft-centred heart...His books are like the world they portray: wild at heart and weird on top.
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Featuring the novels: Wild at Heart, Perdita Durango, Sailor’s Holiday, Sultans of Africa, Consuelo’s Kiss and Bad Day for the Leopard Man
The Wild Life of Sailor and Lula presents Gifford’s best prose work as he originally conceived it: six inter-locking novels which chart the riotous and stormy lives of Sailor Ripley and Lula Pace Fortune – the horribly likeable, sex-driven, star-crossed lovers immortalised in David Lynch’s movie Wild at Heart.
Masterful with dialogue, and always full of vitality and humour, these novels show a writer at the height of his – considerable – talent. As Elmore Leonard said of him, “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.”
Gifford's grim scene-setting embraces people, places, hope, courage and despair. That's plenty to be going on with.
Intense, precise, funny, often sad - Mr Gifford is a master of precision in a strange, stark beauty of language.
Barry Gifford
View profileBarry Gifford was born in Chicago in 1946. His novels have been translated into twenty-two languages. His book Night People was awarded the Premio Brancati in Italy, and he has been the recipient of awards from PEN, the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Library Association and the Writers Guild of America.
David Lynch’s film Wild at Heart, which was based on Gifford’s novel, won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1990. Gifford’s novel Perdita Durango was made into a feature film by Spanish director Alex de la Iglesia in 1997. Barry Gifford co-wrote with director David Lynch the film Lost Highway (1997); he also co-wrote with director Matt Dillon the film City of Ghosts (2003).
Barry Gifford’s other books include The Phantom Father, named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; Wyoming, named a Los Angeles Times Novel of the Year, and which has been adapted for the stage and film; American Falls: The Collected Short Stories and The Rooster Trapped in the Reptile Room: A Barry Gifford Reader.
