Fiction of Gay Interest

In A Shallow Grave
James Purdy
Publisher: Gay Men's Press
London, UK

Year


 		1988       first publ USA: 1975
Cover / size: Paperback / h 19.9 cm * w 12.6 cm / 140 pp

Dustjacket?   n/a

ISBN: 0854490930

Arbery Ref:   001304

Condition Very Good

Cover: slight wear to edges; spine unbroken. Erased pencil notes to front endpaper. Pages brown but otherwise clean.

Price £4.00
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Purdy: In a Shallow Grave






Plot / Content:                              Rating: S

"When they sent Garnet Montrose to Vietnam they told him he'd go out a boy and come back a man. But he comes back a freak, so hideously, scarred that no one can stand to look at his face. The explosion which destroyed his company has skinned him alive.

"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 . . . "

(from the cover)



Background / Biography:

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).


For more information on James Purdy, and other books of his from Arbery Books, click here 		Joseph Hansen Photo by Carl Van Vechten, 1957





Reviews:

"A marvellous tour-de-force. A novel that engages as it entertains, draws the reader in as it draws something out of him. In other words, a very impressive book." Publishers Weekly

"Mr Purdy writes like an angel, with accuracy, wit and freshness, but a fallen angel, versed in the sinful ways of men." The Times

(from the cover)




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"'What you will need now you are about to be separated from the Army,' my captain had told me as I was picking up my mustering-out pay, 'is what in the days of my grandfather they called a valet or maybe a hired man. Unless of course you want to stay in the Vets' hospital, which you have more than every right to . . . But you will need someone to watch over you . . . ' "

opening paragraph




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