The Exception

From the award-winning author and screenplay writer comes a collected book that brings together all of Barry Gifford’s Uncle Buck stories, many written in 2024 and 2025 with others dating back to the early 2000s.
“Gifford . . . can sum up in a few words the cruelty, horror, and crushing banality that shape an entire life.”
—Anthony Bourdain, The New York Times Book Review
These stories feature hard lessons in adulthood marred by betrayals, murders and madness, while also evoking the innocence of the boy and, hauntingly, the world-weary innocence, too, of Uncle Buck. The novelist Jim Harrison believed Uncle Buck to be one of Gifford’s most enduring creations.
Just as readers were introduced to the immortal characters of Sailor and Lula in Gifford’s Wild at Heart in 1990—brought to cinematic life that same year by Nicholas Cage and Laura Dern in David Lynch’s Palme d’Or-winning film—Uncle Buck and Roy come to life in The Exception as indelible American characters, restoring a sense of family out of the broken pieces left behind after death and divorce.
Set in the ’50s and early ’60s in Tampa, Florida; Chicago; Cocoa Beach, Florida; Havana, Cuba; Cuernavaca and Acapulco, Mexico; Parris Island, South Carolina; Belfast, Ireland; and returning in the end to Tampa when Uncle Buck is approaching death at the age of 93, these stories are epic in scope, and at the same time disarmingly intimate. We feel the breath of these everyday warriors on our faces in every story. In this world, cars are Eldorados and Cadillac Coupe Devilles, men smoke cigars, own construction businesses and nightclubs, fish for marlin, women smoke Chesterfields, and children look on in awe.
Gifford’s world is alive and eternal, returning us to this time and these places that exist no longer, except here.

BARRY GIFFORD is the author of more than forty published works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, which have been translated into twenty-eight languages. Gifford began his career as a poet and musician. His most recent prose works are The Roy Stories, Landscape With Traveler: The Pillow Book of Francis Reeves, and Jack's Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac. His most recent poetry collection is Imagining Paradise: New and Selected Poems (2012). Gifford lives in the San Francisco area.