63 DREAM PALACE

63 Dream Palace by James Purdy: Short novel about two teenaged brothers who move from West Virginia to an abandoned building in a Chicago slum after their mother dies. The youngest brother, Claire Riddleway, is too sick to go outside and must be helped around the house. Two Chicagoans named Parkhearst Cratty and Grainger promise to help the brothers.



He told nearly everything, as though in a police court, that he was Fenton Riddleway and that he was nineteen, that he had come with his brother Claire from West Virginia, from a town named Ronceverte, that their mother had died two weeks before, and that a friend of his named Kincaid had given him an address in a rooming house on Sixty-three Street. “You mean sixty-third,” Parkhearst corrected him, but Fenton did not hear the correction then or when it was made fifty times later: “A house on Sixty-three Street,” he continued. “It turns out to be a not-right-kind of place at all...”