The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy
Book (italiano):
The publication of <em>The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy</em> is a literary event that marks the first time all of James Purdy’s short stories—fifty-eight in number, including seven drawn from his unpublished archives—have been collected in a single volume.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 Edward Albee, Gertrude Stein, Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams, Lillian Hellman, Dorothy Parker, as well as Jonathan Franzen and Jonathan Lethem, Purdy’s vast body of work has heretofore been relegated to the avant-garde fringes of the American literary mainstream.<p>During his lifetime, the Ohio-born Purdy was all too often marginalized as <em>only</em> a "gay author" with themes too dark and scabrous for popular consumption, though his unique, mercurial talent garnered him a cult following and made him—in the words of Susan Sontag—"one of the half dozen or so living American writers worth taking seriously." Purdy’s status as a literary outlaw earned him as much outrage and condemnation as lasting admiration, with some even classifying his work as psychotic—the description "mentally insane" was included in one rejection. Purdy’s fiction was considered so dangerous—and not just for its homoerotic content— that his first book, <em>63: Dream Palace</em>, 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.</p><p>Best known for his novels <em>Malcolm</em>, <em>Cabot Wright Begins</em>, and <em>Eustace Chisholm and the Works</em>, 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 and characterized by his dark sense of humor and jaundiced eye. Sexual obsession, disillusionment, 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" (<em>Guardian</em>). In "Color of Darkness," for example, a lonely child attempts to swallow his father’s wedding ring; in "Sermon," a preacher tells his flock their lives are hopeless; in the gothic horror of "Mr. Evening," a young man is hypnotized and imprisoned by an predatory old woman; and in the never-before-published "The Pupil," the line between the seducer and the seduced is blurred between a gym coach and his student. These stories and many others, both haunting and hilarious, form a canvas of both 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).</p><p>It may have taken over fifty years, but American culture is finally catching up to 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."</p>
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