Purple Men 2000

The next time Trent wakes up it’s 4 a.m. on Wednesday, August 4, 1993. Therapists prepare us for death and Morrissey just released his third solo album.

Trent and Daryl are a couple living together in San Francisco in the early nineties. This story follows them over the course of one day as they prepare to throw a dinner party, while dealing with— among other things—ailing pet fish, HIV, a psychotic stalker ex, annoying friends, a new job and the ennui of approaching middle age. Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, Purple Men 2000 is Robert Glück’s distinct take on the “day in the life” genre: funny, smart, uncomfortable and moving in equal measure.

“Because Glück emphatically constructs the reality he shows, his reader is always aware of the writer writing; and this translucence is, somehow, an entirely natural element in his work, rather than a conspicuous device. Glück’s authorial voice is personal and dispassionate; it is a voice whose very mildness lures one into an orgiastic wilderness without maps or compass. He is an avuncular de Sade.”

—Gary Indiana

Robert Glück is a poet, fiction writer, critic, potter, and editor. Glück is the author of the story collections Elements and Denny Smith; and the book-length works Jack the Modernist, Margery Kempe and About Ed (all published by New York Review Books); and a volume of collected essays, Communal Nude. His books of poetry include La Fontaine with Bruce Boone, Reader, In Commemoration of the Visit with Kathleen Fraser, and I, Boombox. Glück has served as codirector at Small Press Traffic, as an associate editor at Lapis Press, and as the director of the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University, where he is an emeritus professor. 

Paperback
66 pages
6 December 2025
ISBN 9781068478826