On the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Barry Gifford’s international bestseller, Wild at Heart, and as well as the anniversary of the Palme d’Or-winning film adaptation by director David Lynch, Sailor & Lula: The Complete Novels presents all of the novels and novellas that comprise the saga of Sailor Ripley and Lula Pace Fortune, “the Romeo and Juliet of the South”: Wild at Heart, Perdita Durango (also made into a feature film), Sailor’s Holiday, Sultans of Africa, Consuelo’s Kiss, Bad Day for the Leopard Man, and The Imagination of the Heart. 
“Gifford sketches marvelous characters as deftly as William Faulkner and animates them in scene after scene of hilarious dialogue. . .. Barry Gifford continues to be one of America’s most original writers.”
— Playboy
“Barry Gifford invented his own American vernacular — William Faulkner by way of B-movie film noir, porn paperbacks, and Sun Records rockabilly — to forge the stealth-epic of Sailor &; Lula. His accomplishment looks more and more like one of the permanent glories of recent storytelling, a set of crude masterpieces like Philip Guston’s late paintings. The compression and verve on view on every page of this compendium is as irresistible and dizzying as a dish of brandy-filled chocolates forged in shapes of pistols, hangmen’s ropes, convertible automobiles, and unclad, steamy bodies, daring you to keep gobbling them up.”
— Jonathan Lethem
“I saw Sailor and Lula in love in the middle of a crazy, violent, wild world, and I wanted to go on that trip with them. . . . It’s like looking into the Garden of Eden before things went bad.”
— David Lynch
