Writers: 13 Vignettes

Barry Gifford

Writers: 13 Vignettes
Format
Hardback
Publisher
Seven Stories Press,U.S.
Country
United States
Published
3 November 2015
Pages
130
ISBN
9781609806491

Writers: 13 Vignettes

Barry Gifford

In Writers- 13 Vignettes, 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, which is to say at their worst- they are liars, frauds, lousy lovers, and drunks. This is a world in which Emily Dickinson remains an unpublished poet, Ernest Hemingway drunkenly sets explosive trip wires outside his home in Havana, Marcel Proust implores the angel of death as a delirious Arthur Rimbaud lies dying in a hospital bed, and Albert Camus converses with a young prostitute while staring at himself in the mirror of a New York City hotel room. 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 more than a shared needling 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 means to devote oneself entirely to art? And as an artist, what defines success and failure?

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