While she is visiting her father and stepmother in California, 15-year-old Alison learns her mother is a lesbian.

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

Cabot Wright Begins, first published in 1964, may be one of the most neglected masterpieces in post–World War II American literature. Cabot Wright is a handsome, Yale-educated stockbroker and scion of a good family. He also happens to be the convicted rapist of nearly three hundred women. Bernie Gladhart is a naive used-car salesman from Chicago, who—spurred on by his ambitious wife—decides to travel to Brooklyn and write the Great American Novel about the recently paroled Cabot Wright. As Bernie tries to track down Wright in Brooklyn, he encounters a series of bizarre and Dickensian characters and sets in motion an extraordinary chain of events. In this merciless and outrageous satire of American culture, cult writer James Purdy is unsparing and prophetic in his portrayal of television, publishing, Wall Street, race, urban poverty, sex, and the false values of American culture in a work compared to Candide by Susan Sontag. Considered too scabrous for the stifling culture mores of the early 1960s, Purdy's comic fiction evokes "an American psychic landscape of deluded innocence, sexual obsession, violence and isolation" (New York Times).

James Purdy's novel, Garments the Living Wear, is a vision of evil and dark salvation peopled with bizarre and memorable characters. Satirizing life in New York City in the 1980s, its themes include the scourge of AIDS, criminal conspiracies, the excesses of the superrich, modern evangelism, and love in its many forms.

In England his novels are always bestsellers, yet for the last decade this American literary master has not been published in his own country. No longer! Gertrude of Stony Island Avenue displays the same plainspoken power that has dazzled Purdy's devoted audience for decades. The story of a woman's struggle to come to terms with a life seemingly emptied of meaning by her estranged daughter's death, it explores themes that Purdy has long made his own: the mysterious connections between creativity & self destruction; the human alchemy that binds us even as it forces us apart; the paradox of loss that leads ultimately to renewed life & love. Its portraits of two very different women -- a bereaved, bewildered mother & the artistic, passionate, doomed daughter she is still striving to understand -- are sketched in deceptively simple lines that finally, magically depict a complex world filled with characters observed in such utterly particular detail that they achieve a resonant universality that every reader will recognize.