BOOKS & the ARTS Brawith is a soldier, or at least he was. his grandmother, Moira, has just brought him home from the "Vets Hospital" to her "nice property" in Flempton, a fictional small town in the Midwest. Purdy also had a life-changing impact on Gordon Lish, whose notorious penchant for pared-down language was partly inspired by Purdy's early conversational stories and whose editorial influence on the fiction of the 1970s, '80s, and '90s was immense. Purdy moved to Doubleday in the late 1960s, but after the publisher was unable to secure a New York Times review for his 1974 novel The House of the Solitary Maggot, Purdy felt jilted once again and left mainstream publishing altogether. [Extracted from the article]