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“... James Purdy​ ’s literary career comes with its own creation myth. He had been making no headway until in 1956 Edith Sitwell read a privately printed book of his stories and, ravished, threw herself into finding him a publisher and an audience. In one version of the event, Don’t Call Me by My Right Name, the book Purdy sent from America to Italy, made the last stage of its journey supernaturally, materialising by Sitwell’s bedside when she woke from a nap ...”

“... and dealer in pornography. Among the contents were letters from various notabilities, including James Joyce and Parnell. Thirty years later, long after disowning his foster-parents and losing track of the box, he speaks of the letters to the librarian of the Celtic Library and is offered a substantial sum for them. Desperate for money he forges them, from ...”

“... and Star Turn are both pretty rich in fabulative mania, but (as Huck Finn might have put it) it is James Purdy’s On Glory’s Course which is the champion stretcher case. Purdy’s novel is set in Fonthill, an oil town somewhere in the Midwestern hinterland at the beginning of the Great Depression, and at first the ...”

“... room in his fiction for the truly bizarre and unpredictable. Out with the Stars is not exactly James Purdy’s most polished work, and will hardly convert those detractors who view his writing as a parodic assault on literary convention, a sort of sustained novelistic suicide. But there is certainly fun to be had in this convoluted story of an ageing ...”

“... But the reviewer for Les Nouvelles littéraires found the hero ‘closer to those of Updike and James Purdy than to those of our “new novel”’. Kaplan remarks that this was ‘just the kind of neither/nor position that suited her’, and the young Derrida saw merit in it: ‘A certain “misunderstanding” is often – especially in cases like ...”

“... it relies heavily on self-revelation in the novels, and is rather short on concrete detail. R.L. Purdy’s invaluable Bibliographical Study (1954) gives far more than its name implies, and is packed with biographical information. And innumerable references to Hardy, pen-portraits and sketches, appear in the memoirs of others. So altogether a completer ...”

“... all those letters that have been lost or destroyed. Hence a scholarly enterprise such as the Purdy/Millgate edition, now complete, of Hardy’s letters, handsomely produced and impeccably edited though it is – or perhaps precisely because it has such a finished and monumental look – can inadvertently create a false impression. ‘Collected ...”

“... Some of the best buildings are those which record pure Yankee ingenuity: the Octagon Barn of the James L. and Cora Purdy Farm, for example, which is 100 feet in diameter and has 48 foot high walls – a machine for automated cattle-feeding. And there are things which might be ignored if they did not take place on an ...”

“... been long-needed by me. The other Oxford book is more curious. In 1979 appeared in one volume James Gibson’s Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy: A Variorum Edition. And this Richard Taylor calls ‘a major publishing event ... carried out with meticulous care and loving exactness ...’ That is putting it a bit steep, but the book is on my shelves, it is ...”

“... contains the variant readings, with such minute differences of presentation, as compared with James Gibson’s Variorum, as only the aficionado will wish to pore over. The printing, paper and production are in the best style of the Press; the Explanatory Notes are on a discreet scale. It cannot be said that Hardy’s works are of a kind which benefits ...”

“... A Politics for the Anthropocene, the progressive American writer and professor of law Jedediah Purdy puts it this way: ‘The Anthropocene has to be named before people can try to take responsibility for it’.2 The ecological reality, once acknowledged, can become a political imperative, leading to collective environmental decision-making where for now ...”