Memories from a Sinking Ship [Double CD Audiobook] [Audio CD]

Barry Gifford (Author), Oscar Bucher (producer) (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 25, 2007

A new novel from the author of Wild at Heart
Winner of the Christopher Isherwood Foundation Prize for Fiction in 2006

Memories from a Sinking Ship
BY BARRY GIFFORD

A Double CD Audiobook
Selections from the novel, read by the author
Produced and recorded with original music by Oscar Bucher at OB3 Studios in San Francisco

Praise for Barry Gifford:

"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

"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

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

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, 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.

Barry Gifford was, is, and always shall be an America Original.
--Richard Price

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Gifford has exceeded in distilling the essence of childhood, evoking not only his young hero's innocence and trustingness, but also his resilient cheerfulness and active imagination." --Los Angeles Times

"Gifford's people are pure American; pure in their madness, in their evil; and to read about, pure pleasure." --Alan Cheuse, National Public Radio

"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

About the Author

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. The novel Memories from a Sinking Ship is published in its entirety by Seven Stories Press, New York.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Audio CD
• Publisher: Oscar Bucher - OB3 Studios (September 25, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1604612134
• ISBN-13: 978-1604612134
• Product Dimensions: 5.6 x 4.8 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,811,155 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Going To Chicago", August 30, 2007

By 

Gerald Rosen "novelist" (San Francisco) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Memories from a Sinking Ship [Double CD Audiobook] (Audio CD)

This collection of Barry Gifford's stories from his "Memories from a Sinking Ship," is a perfect introduction to Gifford's work and a must for his many fans. The double CD, excellently produced by Oscar Blucher, has Gifford reading his own work, a treat since we can hear the nuances of tone and timing and the continual dead pan humor straight from the author's mouth. The stories were always alive but now they seem almost to have been made to have been read aloud. Of all of Gifford's books, this is the best. We follow Gifford's alter-ego Roy as he attempts to grow up in a world that Frank Sinatra would have been perfectly at home in- gangsters, ballpayers, blues singers, hip hotels, Chicago, New Orleans, Havana, Miami, Key West, a world of loneliness, violence, and surprising tenderness. ("Say hello to Mr.[i.e. Meyer] Lansky, Roy.") Between driving around the country with his mother as she goes from one boyfriend to another, Roy sometimes attends school, but his education comes mostly from other arenas, movie theaters, hotel lobbies, Wrigley Field, cheap paperbacks and classic novels- Ernie Banks and Ernie Hemingway. Joseph Conrad and Joseph Cotten. In paintings from the middle-ages children are portrayed as miniature adults and Roy is treated this way by the adults in the stories. They confide in him, speak to him like an adult, and are forever leaving him waiting alone in theaters and hotel lobbies or at his grandma's rat infested house, while they go off to their crooked businesses and assignations. Yet somehow we see that Roy is going to make it out of this world, he will grow up on his own, and all these crazy and violent and touching street people will become a rich source of characters and life experiences for him (and perhaps for his stories if, like Gifford, he becomes a writer.) Gifford began by telling Chicago stories and we have reason to be grateful that he has come full circle, for, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot, now he knows the place for the second time. He's an excellent reader as well as writer and all I can say is: Move over Nelson Algren, Barry Gifford is back in town.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Tellin' of Roy, September 26, 2007

By 

Carol Collier (San Francisco) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Memories from a Sinking Ship [Double CD Audiobook] (Audio CD)

Most enjoyable! On a recent road trip, a friend and I listened to the entire 2-CD recording and put many a mile behind us while absorbed in the growing-up experiences of Roy, a kid in 1950s-era Chicago. People are what they are in Roy's world -- no apologies, just the facts, and Roy is watching every move. As the stories take Roy from age five to 17, what he observes and expeirences is sometimes sad; sometimes it's hilarious. It's told in Mr. Gifford's clean and direct style, and in a way that's unsentimental but essentially kind. If, as other reviewers have said, this book repeats material that is in other books (much of it autobiographical, it would seem), this is the one to get. Or maybe it's time to hear them in this context, where each story stands on its own, and at the same time all are linked in tone and chronology to form a single narrative.
Some authors are better than others at reading their own work aloud, and Barry Gifford is one of the good ones. He avoids putting an emotional spin on the material, in keeping with the unjudgmental way the stories are written. Instead, his calm, matter-of-fact tone lets the listener decide how to think about the stories.
The production is seamless. One thing I'm really curious about is the snippets of wonderful music beween the stories. They are most evocative and my friend and I agreed we'd like to hear a compilation of the complete songs. The liner notes say it's all original music from producer Oscar Bucher, so next I'll have to find some of his recordings.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Essential listening for fans of Barry Gifford's stories, August 21, 2007

By 

A Reader (Cape May, NJ) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Memories from a Sinking Ship [Double CD Audiobook] (Audio CD)

I've been a fan of Barry Gifford's work since I was introduced to the beautiful "Wyoming" and "The Phantom Father" some years back. Both of these had a tone and tenderness I don't come across very often, though I read a lot of new fiction. Gifford's new collection, "Memories from a Sinking Ship", was just released this year, and if you liked the two earlier books, you'll be happy to slip back into Gifford's childhood world of 1940's and 50's America. As far as I know, this is the first time an audiobook of Gifford reading his stories has been released, but it's a great companion to the novel. For people familiar with the stories, it's a real treat to have, and if you're new to them, this is a unique introduction.

Memories from a Sinking Ship
Wyoming
Phantom Father: A Memoir
The Stars Above Veracruz
The Rooster Trapped in the Reptile Room: A Barry Gifford Reader