Barry Gifford celebrates the publication of The Boy Who Ran Away to Sea: Stories published by Seven Stories Press

Books to be sold by City Lights. Barry Gifford shall sign copies of the new book after the interview and screening.

“Barry Gifford is a killer f**kin’ writer … Roy’s World captures his childhood and that time in Chicago, and many other places. I really enjoyed watching it and then contemplating what goes on inside a person with this history. I really love that world and the things that can happen there.” –David Lynch

Hailed as “William Faulkner by way of B-movie film noir, porn paperbacks and Sun Records rockabilly,” poet, author, and screenwriter Barry Gifford has given the world more than forty works, including the Sailor and Lula novels that inspired David Lynch’s “Wild At Heart.” Featuring Willem Dafoe, Matt Dillon, and Lili Taylor, Rob Christopher’s documentary brilliantly brings to life Gifford’s autobiographical collection of stories, capturing a vanished 1950s Chicago through an impressionistic combination of beguiling archive footage, animation and spoken word. Chicago jazz musician and composer Jason Adasiewicz’s first original score, performed by such luminaries as Joshua Abrams and Hamid Drake, adds to the film’s noir atmosphere.

Directed by Rob Christopher. 2020. 75 minutes. DCP.

Co-presented by Seven Stories Press. 

In this latest installment of the Roy Stories series, Roy is the muse of Gifford’s hardboiled style, a precocious child, watching the grown-ups try hard to save themselves, only to screw up again and again. He takes it all in, every waft of perfume and cigar smoke, every missed opportunity to do the right thing. And then there are the good things too. A fishing trip with Uncle Buck, a mother’s love, advice from Rudy, Roy’s father: “Roy means king. Be the king of your own country. Don’t depend on anyone to do your thinking for you.” The stories in The Boy Who Ran Away to Sea are together a love letter and a tribute to the childhood experiences that ground a life.

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