Author: James Purdy Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company ISBN: 0871406691 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 743
Book Description
Celebrate “an authentic American genius” (Gore Vidal) in James Purdy’s first complete short story collection. The publication of The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy is a literary event that marks the first time all of James Purdy’s short stories—fifty-six in number, including seven drawn from his unpublished archives—have been collected in a single volume. As prolific as he was unclassifiable, James Purdy was considered one of the greatest—and most underappreciated—writers in America in the latter half of the twentieth century. Championed by writers as diverse as Dame Edith Sitwell, Gore Vidal, Paul Bowles, Tennessee Williams, Carl Van Vechten, John Cowper Powys, and Dorothy Parker, Purdy’s vast body of work has heretofore been relegated to the avant-garde fringes of the American literary mainstream. His unique form and variety of style made the Ohio-born Purdy impossible to categorize in standard terms, though his unique, mercurial talent garnered him a following of loyal readers and made him—in the words of Susan Sontag—“one of the half dozen or so living American writers worth taking seriously." Purdy’s journey to recognition came with as much outrage and condemnation as it did lavish praise and lasting admiration. Some early assessments even dismissed his work as that of a disturbed mind, while others acclaimed the very same work as healing and transformative. Purdy's fiction was considered so uniquely unsettling that his first book, Don't Call Me by My Right Name, a collection of short stories all reprinted in this edition, had to be printed privately in the United States in 1956, after first being published in England. Best known for his novels Malcolm, Cabot Wright Begins, Jeremy's Version, and Eustace Chisholm and the Works, Purdy captured an America that was at once highly realistic and deeply symbolic, a landscape filled with social outcasts living in crisis and longing for love, characterized by his dark sense of humor and unflinching eye. Love, disillusionment, the collapse of the family, ecstatic longing, sharp inner pain, and shocking eruptions of violence pervade the lives of his characters in stories that anticipate both "David Lynch and Desperate Housewives" (Guardian). In "Color of Darkness," for example, a lonely child attempts to swallow his father's wedding ring; in "Eventide," the anguish of two sisters over the loss of their sons is deeply felt in the summer heat; and in the gothic horror of "Mr. Evening," a young man is hypnotized and imprisoned by a predatory old woman. These stories and many others, both haunting and hilarious, form a canvas of deep desperation and immanent sympathy, as Purdy narrates "the inexorable progress toward disaster in such a way that it's as satisfying and somehow life-affirming as progress toward a happy ending" (Jonathan Franzen). It may have taken over fifty years, but American culture is finally in sync with James Purdy. As John Waters writes in his introduction, Purdy, far from the fringe, has "been dead center in the black little hearts of provocateur-hungry readers like myself right from the beginning."
Author: James Purdy Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield ISBN: 1566637988 Category : American drama Languages : en Pages : 304
Book Description
"James Purdy's Selected plays will break your damaged little heart."--John Winter."James Purdy's plays have much of the exciting existentiality that infuses his novels and seem content to take drama to interesting places it does not always want to go." -- Edward Albee."James Purdy is an authentic American genius." --Gore Vidal.
Author: James Purdy Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company ISBN: 0871409607 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 224
Book Description
The twenty-first-century revival of James Purdy continues with his classic novel of innocence and corruption. Introduced simply as “the boy on the bench,” the titular character of Malcolm is a Candide-like figure who is picked up by the “most famous astrologer of his period” and introduced to a series of increasingly absurd characters and bizarre situations in “the most prodigiously funny book to streak across these heavy-hanging times” (Dorothy Parker).
Author: James Purdy Publisher: Da Capo Press ISBN: 9780786716692 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 191
Book Description
A classic work of surreal fiction, originally published in 1978, is a passionate and violent love story about adolescent obsession and revenge. By the author of The House of the Solitary Maggot. Original.
Author: James Purdy Publisher: City Lights Publishers ISBN: 9780872862340 Category : Languages : en Pages : 160
Book Description
Purdy does not celebrate the wonders of our lives; he digs under the flesh, deals with the howling of our nighttime existence, the rough arithmetic of our dreams. He is also a very funny writer, one who captures the particular idiom of women and men...
Author: James Purdy Publisher: Fordham Univ Press ISBN: 1531501249 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 91
Book Description
On its surface, I Am Elijah Thrush is the story of Millicent De Frayne and her sensational half-century campaign to win the love of Elijah Thrush. Elijah, after ruining the lives of countless men and women, is finally in love “incorrectly, if not indecently,” with his great-grandson, Bird of Heaven. To support an unusual habit, a young Black man, Albert Peggs, reluctantly agrees to tell their remarkable story. It is in this telling that the ambitions, desires, and true natures of Elijah, Millicent, and Albert come to light. With a delicately controlled balance of whimsy and pathos, James Purdy gives us this comedy of the heroic, the tragic, and the truly bizarre. Met with critical bewilderment upon its initial publication fifty years ago, this new edition offers a Foreword by Robert J. Corber illuminating Purdy’s “complicated allegory” of objectification, desire, and race in the immediate post–civil rights moment.
Author: James Purdy Publisher: New York : Viking Press ISBN: Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 394
Book Description
On glory's course is set in Fonthill, a small Midwestern town of the 1930s where Adele Bevington, a faded and fallen beauty who surrounds herself with gentlemen callers at all hours of the night, arrives searching for the illegitimate son she never knew and is drawn into a sinister plot with the local townspeople.
Author: James Purdy Publisher: Viking Press ISBN: 9780140061932 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 295
Book Description
A seventeen-year-old innocent, haunted by the ghosts of his two older brothers, encounters an amoral woman who plans to seduce him as she once seduced his brothers
Author: James Purdy
Author: James Purdy
Author: James Purdy
Author: James Purdy
Author: James Purdy
Author: James Purdy
Author: James Purdy
Author: James Purdy
Author: James Purdy
Author: James Purdy