Malcolm

Malcolm
Author: James Purdy
Publisher: Dramatists Play Service Inc
Total Pages: 72
Release: 1966
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780822207191

THE STORY: In the words of Stanley Kauffmann, the play, ...which is a fantasy of the corruption of innocence, concerns a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old boy, well-dressed and well-spoken, who--when we meet him--has been sitting daily on a bench in front

Eustace Chisholm and the Works

Eustace Chisholm and the Works
Author: James Purdy
Publisher:
Total Pages: 264
Release: 1967
Genre: Chicago (Ill.)
ISBN:

Depiction of the strange world of a small group of Americans in Chicago during the depression.

Narrow Rooms

Narrow Rooms
Author: James Purdy
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Total Pages: 191
Release: 2005
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780786716692

A classic work of surreal fiction, originally published in 1978, is a passionate and violent love story about adolescent obsession and revenge. By the author of The House of the Solitary Maggot. Original.

Malcolm: A Comic Novel

Malcolm: A Comic Novel
Author: James Purdy
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2015-04-13
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0871409607

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 in “the most prodigiously funny book to streak across these heavy-hanging times” (Dorothy Parker).

In a Shallow Grave

In a Shallow Grave
Author: James Purdy
Publisher: City Lights Publishers
Total Pages: 160
Release: 1988-11-01
Genre:
ISBN: 9780872862340

Purdy does not celebrate the wonders of our lives; he digs under the flesh, deals with the howling of our nighttime existence, the rough arithmetic of our dreams. He is also a very funny writer, one who captures the particular idiom of women and men...

I Am Elijah Thrush

I Am Elijah Thrush
Author: James Purdy
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Total Pages: 91
Release: 2022-10-04
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1531501249

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 that 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.

On Glory's Course

On Glory's Course
Author: James Purdy
Publisher: New York : Viking Press
Total Pages: 394
Release: 1984
Genre: Fiction
ISBN:

On glory's course is set in Fonthill, a small Midwestern town of the 1930s where Adele Bevington, a faded and fallen beauty who surrounds herself with gentlemen callers at all hours of the night, arrives searching for the illegitimate son she never knew and is drawn into a sinister plot with the local townspeople.

The House of the Solitary Maggot

The House of the Solitary Maggot
Author: James Purdy
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Total Pages: 420
Release: 2005
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780786715176

The common-law wife of an old man called "maggot" gives birth to a boy who becomes obsessed with leaving the house, but when he returns to the family, he must face the reality of brothers he has never met. Original.

The First One Is Free

The First One Is Free
Author: J B Purdy
Publisher: iUniverse
Total Pages: 110
Release: 2006
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0595380301

John MacPeace, AKA Johnny Dodger, is just an accident waiting to happen-or at least that's how it seems to those around him. Incidents just seem to occur whenever and wherever he happens to be. It has been that way as long as John can remember. Johnny has been dragged back home to his small Indiana town, a place he thought he would never see again, and finds himself in a life and death struggle when he agrees to do a small, albeit shady, delivery job for a man he never liked and often fought. But money being money and John without any, he agreed to take the gig only to find out he has been duped and is now set up as the patsy to take the fall by his hated nemesis. He does his best to solve a case that the local police are sure has Johnny Dodger's name written all over it. As if those weren't enough problems for John, his long-lost girlfriend, Ellie Stomperheim, has reasserted herself into his life and has decided to assign herself as his partner while she is on summer break from her teaching job. Thomas Magnum he is not "A very funny novel. J.B. Purdy is Indiana's modern-day Mark Twain." David D. Hale, Visiting Defense Fellow, Centre for Policy Studies, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. "Johnny Dodger is an irresistible cad-and I love him for that!" Karen Burden, Tucson, Arizona. "Once I started this book, I couldn't put it down!" Cindy Pierce, Terre Haute native.