How Chet Baker Died

BARRY GIFFORD is the author of more than forty published works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, which have been translated into thirty languages. He began as a poet, and always returns to that “lyrical but laconic, compassionate but unsentimental” voice. His most recent books include Black Sun Rising/La Corazonada, Roy’s World: Stories 1973–2020, Writers, and Sailor & Lula: The Complete Novels. His most recent poetry collection is Imagining Paradise: New and Selected Poems. Wild at Heart, directed by David Lynch and based on Gifford’s 1990 novel of the same name (one of the eight novels included in Sailor & Lula), from a script co-written by Lynch and Gifford, won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1990, the same year in which Wild at Heart was first published. Gifford and Lynch also cowrote the original screenplay for Lost Highway. Gifford lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.