63: Dream Palace; eleven stories and a novella

Panther, 1961. First U.K. Edition, First Printing. Mass market paperback. Good. 159, [1] pages. Some page discoloration. Preface by Edith Sitwell. Signed on first page. Ink notation inside front cover may also be from author. James Otis Purdy (July 17, 1914 - March 13, 2009) was a controversial American novelist, short-story writer, poet, and playwright who, since his debut in 1956, published over a dozen novels, and many collections of poetry, short stories, and plays. His work has been translated into more than 30 languages and in 2013 his short stories were collected in The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy. He has been praised by writers as diverse as Edward Albee, James M. Cain, Lillian Hellman, Francis King, Marianne Moore, Dorothy Parker, Dame Edith Sitwell, Terry Southern, Gore Vidal (who described Purdy as "an authentic American genius"), Jonathan Franzen (who called him, in Farther Away, "one of the most undervalued and underread writers in America"), A.N. Wilson, and both Jane Bowles and Paul Bowles. Purdy was the recipient of the Morton Dauwen Zabel Fiction Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1993). In addition, he won two Guggenheim Fellowships (1958 and 1962), and grants from the Ford Foundation (1961), and Rockefeller Foundation. He worked as an interpreter and lectured in Europe with the United States Information Agency. From Publishers Weekly: This volume affords readers a new opportunity to evaluate this rare stylist. Purdy has an ear for the way people speak, and his disoriented voice is that of post-World War II America. His characters are emotional cripples--from the two narcissistic body builders focused only on their own forms (and the office co-worker who is obsessed with them) to a woman whose drunken confession of hatred of her spouse and herself provokes domestic violence. Friendship is depicted as ultimately manipulative and hollow; organized religion is a crutch for the walking wounded (an honest but control-oriented preacher in one piece tells his flock that they are hopeless). The showpiece of the collection is the title work, Purdy's striking novella, dealing with a writer's fascination with what he perceives to be a boy's wild freedom, and his discovery that the youth's life is even more circumscribed than his own.