American Falls is the first major collection of short stories from Barry Gifford, master of the dark side of the American reality. These stories range widely in style and period, from the 1950s to the present, from absurdist exercises to romantic tales, from stories about childhood innocence to novellas of murder and revenge.

In the title story, a Japanese-American motel operator chooses not give up a total stranger, a black man wanted for murder, when the police come searching for him. In "Room 584, The Starr Hotel," a man rants his outrage at an amorous couple in the room next door before he himself is arrested for having committed multiple murders. "The Unspoken" recounts the confessions of a man without a mouth who tells about the woman who loved him. And in this collection’s longest fiction, a novella called "The Lonely and the Lost," a small town’s talented and colorful inhabitants solve their problems as best they can until it comes time for the devil to reap what they have sown.

Dark and light intermix in masterful chiaroscuro, dark becoming light, light revealing sinister or brooding complexity. No simple endings, only happy beginnings.

From Booklist

Unlike his novels, most of which fit solidly in the noir tradition and are crackling with kinetic energy, Gifford's short stories are reflective, often elegiac--small moments placed under a microscope. In "My Last Martini," for example, which is one of several stories here to have appeared in previous collections, the narrator listens quietly as an unknown woman on the next barstool tells the story of her family's legacy of sexual dysfunction. The flatness of the narrative style, while seeming to mask emotion, actually manages to heighten the reader's sense of turmoil below the surface. That turmoil takes center stage in a noirish novella, " The Lonely and the Lost," which has more in common with Gifford's novels, including Wild at Heart (1989), than it does with the other stories collected here. Whether passion and violence erupt in surrealistic bursts or roil silently under a placid surface, however, Gifford's insistently idiosyncratic fiction never fails to surprise, jolting us into recognizing the mundane in the midst of the surreal or forcing us to confront tragedy in an empty martini glass. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author

The author of more than forty published works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, which have been translated into twenty-eight languages, BARRY GIFFORD began as a poet and musician. His most recent prose works are Sailor & Lula: The Complete Novels, Sad Stories of the Death of Kings, and Memories from a Sinking Ship: A Novel. His most recent poetry collection is Imagining Paradise: New and Selected Poems (2012). Gifford lives in the San Francisco area and maintains a website at www.barrygifford.com.

American Falls: The Collected Short Stories

Similar American Falls: The Collected Short Stories