Publishing News
Book Deals
December 15-31, 2005 Edition BOOK DEALS Carroll & Graf
To Reissue
Purdy Classics
NEW YORK, NY/12/13/05Cult author James Purdy, author of underground classics such as In a Shallow Grave and Eustace Chisholm and the Works, has signed a deal with Carroll & Graf to reissue three of his fiction works, to be released soon. In addition, Northwestern University Press will release a collection of his plays next summer.
Purdy, now age 82, has been praised by Dorothy Parker, Tennessee Williams and many others as a genius, visionary and great satirist. He has never won a Pulitzer Prize or National Book Award and says he gave up a long time ago the idea that he would be better known.
In a recent interview with Associated Press by Hillel Italie, the author said, “When you’re writing, at least in my case, you’re so occupied by the story and the characters that you have no interest in what people may think or whether I should write to please anyone,” he says, “I couldn’t write if I thought those things.”
