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Barry Gifford and Friends
May 4 @ 6:00 pm
This event will take place at Canessa Gallery, 708 Montgomery Streer, San Francisco, CA 94111 – It is free to the public, but seating is on a first-come, first serve basis.
Barry Gifford in an evening of readings and discussion celebrating the publication of the paperback release of Writers published by Seven Stories Press
This event will take place at Canessa Gallery, 708 Montgomery Streer, San Francisco, CA 94111 – It is free to the public, but seating is on a first-come, first serve basis.
Although this event will not be broadcast live, an audio recording will be made and later posted on the City Lights Podcast Site.
City Lights and Seven Stories Press present
Barry Gifford in an evening of readings and discussion
celebrating the publication of the paperback release of
Writers
published by Seven Stories Press
Barry Gifford is joined by special guests in a “performative” evening of reading and discussion.
In Writers, great American storyteller Barry Gifford paints portraits of famous writers caught in imaginary vulnerable moments in their lives. In prose that is funny, grotesque, and a touch brutal, Gifford shows these writers at their most human and exposed. Here is Ernest Hemingway drunkenly setting explosive trip wires outside his home in Cuba, and Albert Camus conversing with a young prostitute while staring at himself in the mirror of a New York City hotel room. Gifford also conjures up Martha Gellhorn, Jack Kerouac, B. Traven, John Huston, Nelson Algren, Arthur Rimbaud, Jane Bowles, Marcel Proust, Herman Melville, Charles Baudelaire, Jorge Luis Borges, Roberto Bolaño, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett.
In Gifford’s house of mirrors, we are offered a unique perspective on this group of literary greats. We see their obsessions loom large—and none larger than a shared preoccupation with mortality. And yet these stories, which are meant to be performed as plays, are also tender and thoughtful exercises in empathy. Gifford asks: What does it mean to devote oneself entirely to art? And as an artist, what defines success and failure?
Barry Gifford’s fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have been published in thirty languages. His novel Night People was awarded the Premio Brancati, established by Pier Paolo Pasolini and Alberto Moravia, in Italy, and he has been the recipient of the Maxwell Perkins Award and Syndicated Fiction Awards from PEN, as well as awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Library Association, the Writers Guild of America, and the Christopher Isherwood Foundation. He has also been awarded the Ingmar Bergman Chair on Cinema and Theater from the National University of Mexico. His books Sailor’s Holiday and The Phantom Father were each named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times, and his book Wyoming was named a Novel of the Year by the Los Angeles Times. He has written librettos for operas by the composers Toru Takemitsu, Ichiro Nodaira, and Olga Neuwirth. Gifford’s work has appeared in many publications, including The New Yorker, Punch, Esquire, La Nouvelle Revue Française, El País, La Repubblica, Rolling Stone, Brick, Film Comment, El Universal, Projections, Cosmopolitan, and the New York Times. His film credits include Wild at Heart, winner of the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, Perdita Durango, Lost Highway, City of Ghosts, Ball Lightning, American Falls, and The Phantom Father. Barry Gifford’s most recent books are Sailor & Lula: The Complete Novels, The Up-Down, Imagining Paradise: New and Selected Poems, Writers, Southern Nights, Black Sun Rising / La Corazonada,and Roy’s World: Stories 1973–2020. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. For more information visit www.BarryGifford.net
About Canessa Gallery
For more than 45 years, Canessa Gallery has been at the center of San Francisco’s rich artistic, literary, and cultural history. Our mission is to support and showcase the work of artists who
want to be artists for their lifetime. To date, more than 600 new, emerging, and established sculptors, painters, photographers, and performance and literary artists have presented their work at Canessa Gallery. The gallery is located in the landmark Canessa Building — a diminutive old-brick gem that is one of downtown San Francisco’s last links with her colorful, bohemian past. While many of the original buildings in the area did not survive the era of high-and-higher architecture, the historic Canessa Building has — and continues to glow with the light, life, and magic of artists at work.
This event is made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation. To learn more visit: https://citylights.com/foundation/