New York, NY: Seven Stories Press (pub: May 14, 2019)

Paperback. Signed on the title page.

“The Romeo and Juliet of the South” are back in this new edition of the internationally best-selling Sailor and Lula novels, now including for the first time the culminating novel, The Up-Down, by American master Barry Gifford.

“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”—Jonathan Lethem

Here for the first time in print together are all eight of the books that comprise the saga of Sailor Ripley and Lula Pace Fortune, “the Romeo and Juliet of the South”: Wild at Heart, Perdita Durango, Sailor’s Holiday, Sultans of Africa, Consuelo’s Kiss, Bad Day for the Leopard Man, The Imagination of the Heart, and The Up-Down.

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.