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James Purdy
The information here is a condensed version of Purdy's entry on Wikipedia
James Otis Purdy (17 July 1914 – 13 March 2009) was a controversial American novelist, short story-writer, poet, and playwright who published over a dozen novels, several collections of poetry, short stories, and plays. Purdy was the recipient of the Morton Dauwen Zabel Fiction Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1993) and nominated for the 1985 PEN/Faulkner Award for his novel On Glory's Course (1984).
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Photo by Carl Van Vechten, 1957
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Purdy's work was often at the edge of what was printable: Gollancz could not bring himself to print the word "motherfucker" in the 1957 UK edition of 63: Dream Palace (reissued as Colour of Darkness) ; decades later, the German government tried to ban Narrow Rooms but a court threw the case out. Although many readers were scandalised, many distinguished critics and scholars embraced his work from the start, including John Cowper Powys, Dame Edith Sitwell, Dorothy Parker, Jane Bowles, Lillian Hellman and Susan Sontag.
Purdy consistently rejected identity politics and defining oneself
according to one's sexuality. In an interview on Dutch television, Purdy
professed that there is no such thing as either homosexuality or
heterosexuality. Both he said have been "invented by mechanists, psychologists who have never understood human nature."[ref] Similarly, in an interview with Purdy scholar Richard Canning he said that most gays and blacks refuse to admit "that beneath a 'homosexual' and a 'black' is something that's neither homosexual or black."[ref]
The following titles, listed in order of first publication, are currently available from Arbery Books. Prices do not include postage and packing.
Colour of Darkness
1961, 1st UK ed thus, Secker & Warburg, London
Good, £10.00
"Colour of Darkness was originally published under the title 63: Dream Palace. This re-issue contains that now-famous novella and the nine short stories which accompanied it. Also included are a further two stories which are published for the first time."
more details and photos
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Jeremy's Version
(first published 1970) 1971, 1st UK edition, Jonathan Cape, London
Good, £8.00
"When Wilders Fergus married Elvira Summerlad, he was a rising young financier with his first million in his pocket. Within a year, he had ruined not only himself, but Elvira's people as well. As the novel opens, Wilders is preparing to return after a ten-year exile to his wife and three sons. "
more details and photos
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Narrow Rooms
1978, 1st edition, Arbor House, New York
Very Good, £15.00
"As Purdy spins the story of the extraordinary symbiotic relationship between four boys in a remote West Virginia mountain town, led
by the seemingly hypnotic power of one known as "the renderer", the prose itself is rendered by Purdy into spare, ecstatic, brillance,
and Narrow Rooms takes on the resonance of any time, any place, of haunted myth, of a tale of horror told in the darkness by
generations, and never, never to be forgotten . . .
more details and photos
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I Am Elijah Thrush
(first published 1972) 1986, Gay Men's Press, London
Very Good, £4.00
"Enter Elijah Thrush - mime, poet, part prophet of unspeakable corruption and eternal youth - in this bizarre and hilarious fantasy set in James Purdy's own reinterpretation of
New York City."
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Mourners Below
(first published 1981) 1984, 1st UK edition, Peter Owen, London
Very Good, £10.00
"The story of Duane Bledsoe, a dreamy, innocent seventeen-year-old ho lives in obsessive isolation with his bluff, stoical father and with the ghosts of his older brothers, Justin and Douglas, who have been killed in the war. Pursued by these spectres, Duane is driven inexorably into the bed of Estelle Dumont, Justin's former lover, and to a test of his innocence from which he emerges profoundly changed, his ghosts exorcized, but his ingenuousness miraculously intact."
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In a Shallow Grave
(first published 1975) 1988, Gay Men's Press, London
Very Good, £4.00
"Living as a recluse on a storm-battered Virginia farm, he dreams of the days when he was eighteen and king of the local dance hall, kept alive by his obsession with
the untouchable Georgina Rance. It seems this half-life will never end - until the arrival of Daventry, offering him total life or total destruction . . "
more details
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The above prices do not include post and packing.
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on packing & postage are available to Arbery Books subscribers.
Discounts are also available on orders of three books and more.
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also sells secondhand and rare non-gay fiction and non-fiction.
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