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event that marks the first time all of James Purdy’s short stories—fifty-six in number, including seven drawn from his unpublished archives—have been collected in a single vo
No Purdy work has dazzled contemporary writers more than this haunting tale of unrequited love in an indifferent world. A seedy Depression-era boardinghouse in Chicago plays host to a game of emotional chairs (Guardian) in a novel initially condemned for
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
