“ Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place. ” ― Rumi
A soldier named Garnet Montrose returns home to coastal Virginia bearing a grotesque injury which is nauseatingly repellent to anyone who sees him. He hires two young male caretakers, Quintus Pearch and Potter Daventry, who look after his disability. They
A powerful story of love turned round, of passion and fierce discovery, of lives illuminated by flickering violence.As Purdy spins the story of the extraordinary symbiotic relationship between four boys in a remote West Virginia mountain town, led by the
The Nephew (1960), Purdy's second novel, tells of the revelations following the death in war of the nephew of a doting spinster, a retired schoolteacher, in a small Midwest town, who decides to write a memorial booklet. She thereby learns more than she wa
Cabot Wright is a handsome, Yale-educated stockbroker and scion of a good family. He also happens to be the convicted rapist of nearly three hundred women. Bernie Gladhart is a naive used-car salesman from Chicago, who—spurred on by his ambitious wife�
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event that marks the first time all of James Purdy’s short stories—fifty-six in number, including seven drawn from his unpublished archives—have been collected in a single vo
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 mo
