The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy

The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy PDF Author: James Purdy
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0871406691
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 743

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Book Description
Celebrate “an authentic American genius” (Gore Vidal) in James Purdy’s first complete short story collection. The publication of The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy is a literary event that marks the first time all of James Purdy’s short stories—fifty-six in number, including seven drawn from his unpublished archives—have been collected in a single volume.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 Dame Edith Sitwell, Gore Vidal, Paul Bowles, Tennessee Williams, Carl Van Vechten, John Cowper Powys, and Dorothy Parker, Purdy’s vast body of work has heretofore been relegated to the avant-garde fringes of the American literary mainstream. His unique form and variety of style made the Ohio-born Purdy impossible to categorize in standard terms, though his unique, mercurial talent garnered him a following of loyal readers and made him—in the words of Susan Sontag—“one of the half dozen or so living American writers worth taking seriously." Purdy’s journey to recognition came with as much outrage and condemnation as it did lavish praise and lasting admiration. Some early assessments even dismissed his work as that of a disturbed mind, while others acclaimed the very same work as healing and transformative. Purdy's fiction was considered so uniquely unsettling that his first book, Don't Call Me by My Right Name, 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. Best known for his novels Malcolm, Cabot Wright Begins, Jeremy's Version, and Eustace Chisholm and the Works, 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, characterized by his dark sense of humor and unflinching eye. Love, disillusionment, the collapse of the family, 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" (Guardian). In "Color of Darkness," for example, a lonely child attempts to swallow his father's wedding ring; in "Eventide," the anguish of two sisters over the loss of their sons is deeply felt in the summer heat; and in the gothic horror of "Mr. Evening," a young man is hypnotized and imprisoned by a predatory old woman. These stories and many others, both haunting and hilarious, form a canvas of 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). It may have taken over fifty years, but American culture is finally in sync with 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."

The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy

The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy PDF Author: James Purdy
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0871406691
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 743

Get Book Here

Book Description
Celebrate “an authentic American genius” (Gore Vidal) in James Purdy’s first complete short story collection. The publication of The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy is a literary event that marks the first time all of James Purdy’s short stories—fifty-six 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 Dame Edith Sitwell, Gore Vidal, Paul Bowles, Tennessee Williams, Carl Van Vechten, John Cowper Powys, and Dorothy Parker, Purdy’s vast body of work has heretofore been relegated to the avant-garde fringes of the American literary mainstream. His unique form and variety of style made the Ohio-born Purdy impossible to categorize in standard terms, though his unique, mercurial talent garnered him a following of loyal readers and made him—in the words of Susan Sontag—“one of the half dozen or so living American writers worth taking seriously." Purdy’s journey to recognition came with as much outrage and condemnation as it did lavish praise and lasting admiration. Some early assessments even dismissed his work as that of a disturbed mind, while others acclaimed the very same work as healing and transformative. Purdy's fiction was considered so uniquely unsettling that his first book, Don't Call Me by My Right Name, 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. Best known for his novels Malcolm, Cabot Wright Begins, Jeremy's Version, and Eustace Chisholm and the Works, 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, characterized by his dark sense of humor and unflinching eye. Love, disillusionment, the collapse of the family, 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" (Guardian). In "Color of Darkness," for example, a lonely child attempts to swallow his father's wedding ring; in "Eventide," the anguish of two sisters over the loss of their sons is deeply felt in the summer heat; and in the gothic horror of "Mr. Evening," a young man is hypnotized and imprisoned by a predatory old woman. These stories and many others, both haunting and hilarious, form a canvas of 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). It may have taken over fifty years, but American culture is finally in sync with 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."

The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain

The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain PDF Author: Mark Twain
Publisher: Bantam Classics
ISBN: 0553901966
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 850

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Book Description
For deft plotting, riotous inventiveness, unforgettable characters, and language that brilliantly captures the lively rhythms of American speech, no American writer comes close to Mark Twain. This sparkling anthology covers the entire span of Twain’s inimitable yarn-spinning, from his early broad comedy to the biting satire of his later years. Every one of his sixty stories is here: ranging from the frontier humor of “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” to the bitter vision of humankind in “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg,” to the delightful hilarity of “Is He Living or Is He Dead?” Surging with Twain’s ebullient wit and penetrating insight into the follies of human nature, this volume is a vibrant summation of the career of–in the words of H. L. Mencken–“the father of our national literature.”

The Complete Short Stories of Marcel Proust

The Complete Short Stories of Marcel Proust PDF Author: Marcel Proust
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0815412649
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
This volume gathers together all of Marcel Proust's short fiction and six tales never before translated into English.

The Complete Short Stories Of Thomas Wolfe

The Complete Short Stories Of Thomas Wolfe PDF Author: Thomas Wolfe
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0020408919
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 660

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Book Description
These fifty-eight stories make up the most thorough collection of Thomas Wolfe's short fiction to date, spanning the breadth of the author's career, from the uninhibited young writer who penned "The Train and the City" to his mature, sobering account of a terrible lynching in "The Child by Tiger". Thirty-five of these stories have never before been collected. Lightning Print On Demand Title

The Complete Short Stories of H. G. Wells

The Complete Short Stories of H. G. Wells PDF Author: Herbert George Wells
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 1048

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Book Description
Includes bibliographical references.

The Complete Short Stories of Oscar Wilde

The Complete Short Stories of Oscar Wilde PDF Author: Oscar Wilde
Publisher: Courier Corporation
ISBN: 0486121860
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
Complete texts of "The Happy Prince and Other Tales," "A House of Pomegranates," "Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories," "Poems in Prose," and "The Portrait of Mr. W. H."

The Complete Short Stories of W. Somerset Maugham, Vol. I

The Complete Short Stories of W. Somerset Maugham, Vol. I PDF Author: W. Somerset (William Somerset) Maugham
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 506

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Book Description
This is the first of three volumes of my collected short stories. In my early youth I wrote a number, but they are so immature that I have preferred not to reprint them. A few are in a book that has long remained out of print, a few others are scattered in various magazines. They are best forgotten. The first of the stories in this collection, Rain, was written in 1920 in Hong Kong, but I had hit upon the idea for it during a journey I took in the South Seas during the winter of 1916. The last of my stories was written in New York in 1945 from a brief note that I found by chance among my papers and which I made as far back as 1901. I do not expect ever to write another.

The Complete Short Stories of Jack London

The Complete Short Stories of Jack London PDF Author: Jack London
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780804720588
Category : Short stories, American
Languages : en
Pages : 2557

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Book Description


The Complete Short Stories

The Complete Short Stories PDF Author: Roald Dahl
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 1405910151
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 499

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Book Description
The Complete Short Stories of Roald Dahl in the first of two unsettling and sinister volumes. 'They are brutal, these stories, and yet you finish reading each one with a smile, or maybe even a hollow laugh, certainly a shiver of gratification, because the conclusion always seems so right' Charlie Higson, from his introduction. Roald Dahl is one of the most popular writers of the modern age, effortlessly writing for children and adults alike. In this, the first of two volumes chronologically collecting all his published adult short stories, we see how Dahl began by using his experiences in the war to write fiction but quickly turned to his powerful and dark imagination to pen some of the most unsettling and disquieting tales ever written. In 27 stories, written between 1944 and 1953, we encounter such classic tales as 'Man from the South', featuring a wager with appalling consequences; 'Lamb to the Slaughter', in which a wife murders her husband yet has a novel idea for throwing the police off the scent; and in 'The Sound Machine', the horrific truth about plants is revealed. Enter the sinister, twisted world of Roald Dahl: whether you're young or old, you'll never want to leave. 'Roald Dahl is one of the few writers I know whose work can accurately be described as addictive' Irish Times 'The great magician' Spectator Look out for Volume Two, introduced by Anthony Horowitz Roald Dahl, the brilliant and worldwide acclaimed author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, Matilda, and many more classics for children, also wrote scores of short stories for adults. These delightfully disturbing tales have often been filmed and were most recently the inspiration for the West End play, Roald Dahl's Twisted Tales by Jeremy Dyson. Roald Dahl's stories continue to make readers shiver today.

The Complete Stories

The Complete Stories PDF Author: Isaac Asimov
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 572

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Book Description
Collection of 48 science fiction stories by Isaac Asimov.