From the revered novelist, playwright, and poet James Purdy comes Gertrude of Stony Island Avenue, a literary gem of love and loss -- now in trade paperback. 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!

Hailed as "an authentic American genius" by Gore Vidal and "a writer of the highest rank" by Dorothy Parker, James Purdy displays the same plainspoken power that has dazzled his devoted audience for decades. The story of a woman's struggle to come to terms with the death of her estranged daughter, it explores themes that Purdy has long made his own: the mysterious connections between creativity and self-destruction; the human alchemy that binds us even as it forces us apart; the paradox of loss that leads ultimately to renewed life and love. Its portraits of two very different women -- a bereaved, bewildered mother and the artistic, passionate, doomed daughter she is still striving to understand -- are sketched in deceptively simple lines, depicting a complex, haunting world filled with characters the reader can never forget.