Eric Kraft

Peter Leroy receives his sexual initiation at the hands of the Glynn twins, becomes a sketch doctor, listens to many tales about the night the Nevsky mansion burned, learns the value of hope, and discovers the love of his life. As is usual with Peter's recollections, we are never certain where memory ends and imagination begins-but we are certain that we are reading the work of a brilliant memoirist who reconstructs his past with wry humor, nostalgia, satire, and dazzling invention. "A witty and wildly digressive epistemological examination in the form of a childhood reminiscence." The New Yorker "Wholly engaging ...a daring tour de force." Jonathan Baumbach, The New York Times Book Review "One of the more hilariously erotic pieces of writing since Lolita." Edward Hannibal, The East Hampton Star

In the town of Babbington, New York, at the tail end of an alternative version of the 1950s, a young dreamer named Peter Leroy has set out to build a flying motorcycle, using a design ripped from the pages of Impractical Craftsman magazine. This two-wheeled wonder will carry him not only to such faraway places as New Mexico and the Summer Institute in Mathematics, Physics, and Weaponry, but deep into the heart of a commercialized American culture, and return him to Babbington a hero. More than forty years later, as Babbington is about to rebuild itself as a theme park commemorating his historic flight, Peter must return home to set the record straight, and confess that his flight did not match the legend that it inspired. Flying is an artful, slyly intelligent, wildly inventive, and buoyant comedy of remarkable wingspan, a hilarious story of hoaxes, digressions, do-it-yourself engineering, and the wilds of memory-and a great satire of magical thinking in America. "A reminder of how entertaining a novel can be when it slips the surly bonds of realism. . . . The effect is like a happy-go-lucky Nabokov, with all the road-tripping wordplay and none of the incest. . . . Kraft's affectionately satirical, buoyant language makes Flying soar." Radhika Jones, TIME "Beneath its aw-shucks surface, Flying is an ingenious, at times dizzyingly self-inverting assault not only on the truth, but on the concoction of palatable fictions, as well. Its only inviolate god is the human imagination; it's a paean to flight by a boy who never left the ground, except, perhaps, where it counts most: in his mind." Laura Miller, The New York Times "Eric Kraft is an oddball, an eccentric, a bit of a genius - the writerly equivalent of a dreamer who puts together weird and wonderful contraptions in his garage. . . . Kraft has made his career out of high-wire performance, seizing on the merest hint or detail and spinning it into magic. . . . Flying . . . feels like Kraft's grandest achievement since Herb 'n' Lorna." Richard Rayner, Los Angeles Times "If you were to pick up a hitchhiking Jorge Luis Borges and Robert Pirsig, or to listen as Thomas Pynchon recited Ulysses from memory over longnecks on J. D. Salinger's tab, you might catch the flavor of Eric Kraft's work." Matthew Battles, Barnes & Noble Review "That rare book that can change the way you look at the world." William McKeen, St. Petersburg Times

In Passionate Spectator, memoirist Peter Leroy and his wife, Albertine, are living in Manhattan-by the skin of their teeth. Casting about for a source of income, Peter purchases a book from a homeless street corner peddler, Creative Self-Promotion for Taxidermists, hoping he can adapt its techniques to promote his fledgling business: Memoirs While You Wait, a writing service designed to satisfy the contemporary compulsion for confession and self-revelation. "Middle age, mortality, and the meaning of life: all are examined with the lightest touch imaginable." Kirkus Reviews "Ebullient, canny, and entertaining." Booklist "As devious as a Moebius strip, turning in on itself, doubling back through events that have already occurred, and generally subverting our Newtonian world view." St. Petersburg Times "Nothing less than an assessment of each person's place in the universe . . . as a spectator who gives shape to life simply by watching and remembering." Nashville Scene

Peter Leroy struggles to win the affections of the toothsome Patti Fiorenza while keeping his mother's hopes and his mother's boat afloat.Ella Leroy dreams of escaping the dreary routine of her 1950s wife-and-mom life. Without telling her husband, she enlists her son Peter and his locally-notorious girlfriend Patti in a scheme to buy a run-down clamboat and re-invent it as an elegant cruising vessel for summer people in the bayside town of Babbington, Long Island. But after they've bought the boat, Peter discovers that it is slowly sinking."Raucous, wise, and great fun, this is simply not to be missed." Nancy Pearl, Booklist"The secret dreams and yearnings of a soul in the making, a fool for beauty." Frederic Koeppel, Memphis Commercial Appeal"Fascinating and sophisticated." Jennifer Reese, The New York Times Book Review"The best description of sex appeal anywhere, ever." Peter Jon Shuler

Peter Leroy is in danger of becoming an arrogant, insufferable little egoist. Then something happens that saves him. He falls in love with Albertine Gaudet. That is the end of egoism-and the start of one of literature's great romances. Peter doesn't merely tell the story of his wooing and winning Albertine. He interweaves that story with an account of the troubles that beset him during the writing of the story. Among the obstacles are self-doubt, procrastination, and the demanding clients for his memoir-ghost-writing service Memoirs While You Wait-but that's not all. He begins getting telephone calls intended for a local business, Peerless Television Service and Repair. These oddly compelling calls lure him out of the isolation of his writing room and into the lives of the callers. The result is a poignant, thoughtful meditation on the frustrations of everyday life, the transitory nature of fame and success, persistence, loyalty, the vanity of human wishes, luck, realism, and romance.

Peter Leroy investigates and reconstructs the life stories of his maternal grandparents, Herb and Lorna Piper. On the surface, Herb and Lorna seem to be a typically sunny 1950s American couple. Herb sells Studebakers to the citizens of Babbington, a Long Island seaside town, and Lorna is his cheerfully coy and clever wife. Their story seems like an American myth: small-town origins, Jazz Age romance, Depression trials, postwar prosperity. "A beautiful book." Marc Munroe Dion, The Kansas City Star "A wonderful love story." Lisa Jensen, San Francisco Chronicle "Funny, raunchy, and clever." Justin Kaplan "Nothing short of brilliant." Armistead Maupin "A funny, sexy story told with consummate skill." Malcolm Jones, Jr., The St. Petersburg Times "There aren't enough adjectives to praise this delightfully generous storyteller. Herb 'n' Lorna is a classic. Savor it." Andrei Codrescu, National Public Radio A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR

Peter Leroy explores one of his earliest memories, his mother's tumble from her lawn chair; probes the root causes of his childhood pelecypodophobia (fear of bivalve mollusks, particularly clams); navigates the upper reaches of the Bolotomy River; builds a radio receiver and explores the farthest reaches of the galaxy; ponders the differences between dour foxes and happy clams; falls in love with the girl with the white fur muff; learns the pleasures of skating on ice and taking the long way home; becomes a fan of the Larry Peters Adventure series; and rises to the rank of Aluminum Commodore in the Young Tars.

"[What a Piece of Work I Am] centers on the sultry Ariane, who had been the town bad girl in the 1950s. Baring the sexual secrets and bizarre events of her past ...Ariane pieces together a wild, fascinating tale based on her erotic history. Peter listens as Ariane, who is six years older and more worldly, recounts growing up lower-class and having sex with many boys while the good girls shunned and hounded her for it. He remembers vividly his own puppy love for this luscious older sister of his best friend, Raskol...A rebel before her time, questing, daring yet bumbling in the back seats of guys' cars, fearless to the point of foolishness, she remains resilient enough to pursue a twisting life's odyssey that demonstrates her growing sophistication in matters of love and sex." Mark Ciabattari, Washington Post Book World A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR

Peter Leroy finally completes a junior-high-school science assignment, thirty years late, exploring along the way quantum physics, entropy, epistemology, principles of uncertainty and discontinuity, a range of life's Big Questions, and his memories of his intoxicating science teacher, Miss Rheingold. "Warm ...thought-provoking ...charming ...delightful." Library Journal (starred review) "A book designed to leave its readers-and it deserves many of them-as happy as clams." Walter Satterthwait, The New York Times Book Review "Luminously intelligent fun." Time

Peter Leroy constructs a plausible adult life for his grade school chum Matthew Barber, now living in Boston, where he is vice-president of a toy company by day, but becomes Bertram W. Beath, restaurant reviewer, when the sun goes down. Reservations Recommended is a satire of the critical mind; a dark commentary on contemporary culture; a story of midlife crisis; a morality play; and a book that matches bleakness against humor, seasoned throughout with B. W. Beath's hilariously acid reviews. We watch as Matthew Barber descends from a self-protective superiority into a species of madness, and into the dark night of the soul. "A brilliant satire." LA Life "A merciless sendup of contemporary American pretensions.' Janice Harayda, Cleveland Plain Dealer "Wonderfully readable ...touching and intelligent." Richard Gehr, The Village Voice

Leroy considers the origins of his childhood pelecypodophobia (the fear of bivalve mollusks), meets the imaginary friend who will remain his best friend for life, memorizes the legends of his ancestors in the Leroy line (including Black Jacques Leroy, who "invented beer"), studies his father's nude photographs of family friend May Castle, and enjoys a moonlight swim with Margot and Martha, the Glynn twins, after which he concludes that clams do not bite.

In Passionate Spectator, memoirist Peter Leroy and his wife Albertine are living by the skin of their teeth in Manhattan. Casting about for a source of income, Peter purchases a book from a homeless peddler, Creative Self-Promotion for Taxidermists, hoping he can adapt its techniques to promote his fledgling business: Memoirs While You Wait. That book opens into a beguiling journey from fiction to truth and back again, involving Peter, his childhood friend Matthew Barber (who is undergoing emergency heart surgery), and Peter's witty, urbane alter-ego, Bertram W. Beath--an erotic opportunist and "passionate spectator"of life's pageant.