The prolific and versatile Barry Gifford (Wild at Heart; The Lost Highway) has a little fun with a range of literary figures in Writers, a collection of dramatic scenes "intended to be read as stories as well as performed as plays." Gifford begins with "Spring Training at the Finca Vigía," in which Hemingway showcases his famous bluster and paranoia while hosting two Brooklyn Dodgers at his Cuban home; Martha Gellhorn also makes an appearance in this longest of Gifford's imaginings. Most run around 10 pages in length, and are short and pithy.
The settings range from "relatively realistic" to "wholly imaginary," Gifford warns, and include a conversation between the living Roberto Bolaño and the ghost of Jorge Luis Borges. Arthur Rimbaud tells his sister on his deathbed, "I have been bitten by life before and survived." Marcel Proust's final words are likewise recorded. Herman Melville laments the public's reaction to Moby-Dick to a passing policeman, who worries that he is suicidal. Emily Dickinson questions her sister: "Why? I'm nobody. Who are you? Aren't you nobody, too?"; James Joyce and Samuel Beckett exchange silences. Joining these cameos are Kerouac (with characteristic openness and affinity for drink), Albert Camus, Nelson Algren, Jane Bowles, Baudelaire and others.
Gifford's imagined anecdotes occasionally reference the absurd, but overall tend to confirm readers' impressions of large and troubled personalities. These famous artists appear surreal and often ugly, but by caricaturing them he also reasserts their humanity. The result is both entertaining and thought provoking. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia