Story of the Week

Barry Gifford has been called a master of the dark side of American reality. Wild at Heart, his novel about two sex-driven, star-crossed protagonists on the road, was adapted in film by director David Lynch. In 2006 he was awarded the Christopher Isherwood Foundation Prize for Fiction. More recent work includes Imagining Paradise: New and Selected Poems and The Roy Stories.

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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