From the award-winning author and screenplay writer comes a collected book that brings together all of Barry Gifford’s Uncle Buck stories, many written in 2024 and 2025 with others dating back to the early 2000s.
“Gifford . . . can sum up in a few words the cruelty, horror, and crushing banality that shape an entire life.”
—Anthony Bourdain, The New York Times Book Review
These stories feature hard lessons in adulthood marred by betrayals, murders and madness, while also evoking the innocence of the boy and, hauntingly, the world-weary innocence, too, of Uncle Buck. The novelist Jim Harrison believed Uncle Buck to be one of Gifford’s most enduring creations.
Just as readers were introduced to the immortal characters of Sailor and Lula in Gifford’s Wild at Heart in 1990—brought to cinematic life that same year by Nicholas Cage and Laura Dern in David Lynch’s Palme d’Or-winning film—Uncle Buck and Roy come to life in The Exception as indelible American characters, restoring a sense of family out of the broken pieces left behind after death and divorce.
Set in the ’50s and early ’60s in Tampa, Florida; Chicago; Cocoa Beach, Florida; Havana, Cuba; Cuernavaca and Acapulco, Mexico; Parris Island, South Carolina; Belfast, Ireland; and returning in the end to Tampa when Uncle Buck is approaching death at the age of 93, these stories are epic in scope, and at the same time disarmingly intimate. We feel the breath of these everyday warriors on our faces in every story. In this world, cars are Eldorados and Cadillac Coupe Devilles, men smoke cigars, own construction businesses and nightclubs, fish for marlin, women smoke Chesterfields, and children look on in awe.
Gifford’s world is alive and eternal, returning us to this time and these places that exist no longer, except here.
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
