James Purdy

Collected here for the first time are all James Purdy’s short stories—fifty-six—including seven drawn from unpublished archives. Characterised by his dark sense of humour and jaundiced eye towards American culture, Purdy was considered one of the greatest—and most underappreciated—writers in America in the last half of the twentieth century. Although championed by a diverse range of writers, "an authentic American genius" (Gore Vidal) , Purdy’s work has heretofore been relegated to the avant-garde fringes of the American literary mainstream. Marginalised all too often as a "gay author" with themes too scabrous for popular consumption, his stories anticipate both "David Lynch and Desperate Housewives" (The Guardian). American culture has finally caught up with the man Susan Sontag called "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. His first book, Don’t Call Me by My Right Name, reprinted in this edition, had to be printed privately in the United States in 1956, after first being published in Britain.

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 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.

Garnet Montrose returns home from Vietnam to small-town Virginia with injuries so terrible that people become ill at the sight of him. Seeking assistance and companionship in his isolation, Garnet hires two young male caretakers, Quintus and Daventry. His interest and curiosity are awakened by the books Quintus reads to him, but in the handsome Daventry he finds a powerful, transformative love unlike anything he has experienced before. In this story of the strange, moving relationship of these three men, by turns Gothic, mystical and grotesque, James Purdy has crafted one of his most memorable novels.Widely acclaimed by critics during his lifetime and championed by writers as diverse as Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams, and Jonathan Franzen, James Purdy (1914-2009) is now being rediscovered as a major figure in modern American literature. This long-awaited reissue of one of his finest works, In a Shallow Grave (1975), features a new introduction by Andrew Schenker, who argues that Purdy "provides a reading experience that is deeper, weirder, and ultimately more satisfying than the offerings of just about any other American novelist.""One of the very best writers we have." - New York Times Book Review"A marvelous tour-de-force . . . a very impressive book." - Publishers Weekly"A writer of the highest rank in originality, insight and power." - Dorothy Parker

Since 2005, Valancourt Books has earned a reputation as one of the foremost publishers of lost and rediscovered classics, reissuing more than 400 unjustly neglected works from the past 250 years. In this third volume of horror stories, the editors of Valancourt Books have selected fifteen tales (and one macabre poem) - all by Valancourt authors - for this new collection featuring horror from the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. This volume features a previously unpublished contributions by Steve Rasnic Tem, Eric C. Higgs, and Hugh Fleetwood, as well as thirteen other tales that have never or seldom been reprinted.In this volume, you will encounter tales of ghosts, haunted houses, black magic, monsters, demonic babies, and vengeful spirits. Stories of the strange and sinister, of a boy who unwisely disobeys his grandfather's warning never to go up the stairs, a man whose apparently irrational terror of fire proves all too justified, an unpopular man who discovers a shocking new way of making friends, an ancestor who exerts a chilling influence from beyond the grave. With stories ranging from frightening to horrific to weird to darkly humorous, by a lineup of authors that includes both well-known masters of horror fiction and acclaimed authors of literary fiction, this is a horror anthology like no other.

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.

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."

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—decides to travel to Brooklyn and write the Great American Novel about the recently paroled Cabot Wright. As Bernie tries to track down Wright in Brooklyn, he encounters a series of bizarre and Dickensian characters and sets in motion an extraordinary chain of events. In this merciless and outrageous satire of American culture, cult writer James Purdy is unsparing and prophetic in his portrayal of television, publishing, Wall Street, race, urban poverty, sex, and the false values of American culture in a work compared to Candide by Susan Sontag. Considered too scabrous for the stifling culture mores of the early 1960s, Purdy's comic fiction evokes "an American psychic landscape of deluded innocence, sexual obsession, violence and isolation" (New York Times).

Hailed as "a creative genius" (TLS) and "a singular American visionary" (New York Times ), James Purdy may be best known for his remarkable novels, but he was also an astonishing playwright who wrote nine full-length and twenty short plays. Purdy was one of the few contemporary American writers capable of writing tragedy-Tennessee Williams called him "a uniquely gifted man of the theater." This collection presents four riveting and beautifully crafted works: Brice, The Paradise Circus, Where Quentin Goes, and Ruthanna Elder. Each explores a range of emotional and familial tangles, as fathers betray their sons and squander their inheritances, siblings compete for parental affection, and husbands and wives try to salvage meaning from their broken marriages.

Following the discovery of an anonymous libretto Abner Blossom comes out of retirement to write an opera based on the life of infamous novelist-turned-photographer Cyril Vane. But those who knew Vane and his Russian-born wife, the silent-screen star Madame Olga Petrovna, are prepared to go to any length to suppress the truth about them. Vane’s dark secret follows him to the grave. But his jealous and vengeful widow and her faded cronies employ all the means at their disposal to prevent the opening of Blossom’s opera. Out with the Stars is peopled by the gothic characters readers of James Purdy have come to anticipate and relish. From Val Sturgis, Kentucky boy made good and now Blossom’s protégé, to Francis X. Beauregard, aging star of the silver screen now living surrounded by streetwise hustlers in his Brooklyn mansion. Back in print for the first time since 1993, Purdy’s flamboyant tale of New York City’s pre-Stonewall bohemia includes an incisive foreword by Robert J. Corber, placing the work within its rich social and cultural context.

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 its frank depiction of abortion, homosexuality, and life on the margins of American society.