“ This being human is a guest house. Every morning is a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor...Welcome and entertain them all. Treat each guest honorably. The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in. Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond. ” ― 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event that marks the first time all of James Purdy’s short stories—fifty-six in number, including seven drawn from his unpublished archives—have been collected in a single vo
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
