Jed Purdy

Seven months and two weeks after my first book was published, I hacked a hardback copy into hundreds of pieces with a hunting knife.  When my housemate came into my room to investigate the violent sounds, he found me sitting in a circle of text-fragments of For Common Things.  I looked up at him...
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I spent a lot of the Sunday afternoon before Valentine’s Day at the Smithsonian exhibit (headed for the Met) on  “The Civil War and American Art.”  Although it is staged as part of the 150-year Civil War anniversary, the exhibit’s burning skies, darkened landscapes, and martial corpses are, ironically, just as apt for this coming Sunday’s march...
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For my birthday this year I balanced stones.  About a dozen friends walked with me from a local park through an oak-and-beech forest to a broad streambed that is flanked on one side by a slope almost steep enough to be a cliff.  With a bag of apples and persimmons and a bottle of decent whiskey,...
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  Everything and everyone is mapped, many times over.  Satellite views are overlaid with roads, jurisdictions, household income, consumption habits.  I love maps, and as a child returned week after week to atlas pages showing language families, climate zones, and dominant religions.  One of my most prized possessions a decade ago was a globe...
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Maybe eight months ago, I began dreaming landscapes.  I live in the middle of North Carolina, a frequently sticky region some three hours southeast of the Blue Ridge Mountains and about the same distance northwest of the Atlantic Ocean.  The horizon around here does not feature a horizon; instead, the sky rests nearby, on...
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