Barry Gifford has been called a master of the dark side of American reality. He is the author of more than forty works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, including Wild at Heart, adapted in film by director David Lynch; Imagining Paradise: New and Selected Poems; Roy’s World, also the title of the documentary film about Gifford; The Boy Who Ran Away to Sea (2022); Writers (expanded ed., 2023); and Ghost Years (2024). In 2006 he was awarded the Christopher Isherwood Foundation Prize for Fiction.

Photograph by Tiago Russo Pinto.

The Red Studebaker

A Story

by Barry Gifford

Roy was twelve years old when his mother and her third husband, a jazz drummer named Sid “Spanky” Wade, told him that they were going to move out of Chicago to a suburb north of the city. They had already paid for the beginning of the construction of a new house, and the foundation had been laid. The next day, a Sunday, the four of them—Roy’s mother, her husband, Roy’s one-year-old sister, and Roy—drove out to see it.

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