"Gifford's work falls into two camps: the edgy, wildly eccentric stories, full of weirdness and perversity but portraying characters who exude a bedrock humanity ... and the more realistic, coming-of-age tales that find young innocents thrust with open eyes into a world of pain. His latest collection of stories falls squarely into the second category ... Like Gifford, [Roy] always finds the warm hearts beating beneath the sadness."
-Booklist "Deliciously Giffordesque, full of sudden and swift-passing flares of insight, as if lit from within by match flame."
-Jonathan Kiefer, San Francisco Weekly "Gifford's great talent captures defining moments with the casual grace of anecdote. [He] makes the anecdotal monumental."
-Jonathan Keats, San Francisco Magazine "Barry Gifford's
Sad Stories of the Death of Kings gleams like a stolen silver dollar; one boy's search for wisdom among the hustlers, criminals, and wise guys that reads as evocatively as anything out of Nelson Algren. These stories, sometimes only a page or two, riddled with sharp, subtle dialogue, all glow with the devastating, sometimes gruesome wisdom of Sherwood Anderson and Flannery O'Connor."
-Joe Meno, author of The Great Perhaps and Hairstyles of the Damned
