Amazing. James Purdy, one of my writer heroes and a man whose lifetime of brilliant work has been almost completely ignored by whatever passes for the literary establishment, is the Featured Author of today's Sunday NYT Book Review. There's a nice article about Purdy by Gore Vidal. Two Purdy novels (two of my favorites in fact), Eustace Chisholm and the Works and The House of the Solitary Maggot, are being republished, and a new book of short stories, Moe's Villa, was published late last year.

I had a long and typically wonderful phone call with my friend C last night. I don't know what I'd do without C. How impoverished my C-less life would be. C is the only person I can really talk to sometimes and not feel like I'm presenting a dramatically false version of myself in the interest of conversational efficiency or some other banalizing limitation such as the desire to be even remotely understood. We don't talk often because we both hate the telephone and are both frozen into inaction by such terrifying circumstances as the minor social obligation surrounding the benign voicemail message. Yet whenever we do the hours fly by and everything gets discussed. Last night's chat ranged from Marjoe Gortner's cinematic career to Beckett's Molloy.

She told me that my recent entries about Charles D'Ambrosio not only moved her to purchase Orphans for herself but also to order it to be carried by the New York bookstore she works in, the venerable St. Mark's Bookshop in the East Village. You're welcome, Clear Cut Press.