Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of
4 total works
Peter Leroy explores his earliest memories, which involve Dudley Beaker, a next-door neighbor with a shady occupation; Eliza Foote, a shapely blonde (a product of his imagination); six kittens and one red wagon; and his mother's tumble from her lawn chair. "Shocks of recognition abound, and everything is funny as hell." - Malcolm Jones, The Bloomsbury Review "Eric Kraft has spent his writing career creating a series of comic masterpieces...and am I ever glad he did...The books can be read in any order, but be warned: Once you start the series, you won't want to read anything else until you finish them all." - Nancy Pearl, Book Lust "Reading Kraft's inventive and effervescent tales is a rare and sustaining joy." - Donna Seaman, Newsday "[Kraft's Peter Leroy series is] perhaps the most ambitious and rewarding literary enterprise of our time." - Andrew Ervin, The San Francisco Chronicle LENGTH: novella, approximately 20,000 words, 96 pages in the trade paperback edition
Leroy recalls his maternal grandfather's attempt to build a shortwave radio, a project that begins with an article in Impractical Craftsman magazine promising "hour after interminable hour of baffling precision work." After many, many hours spent watching his grandfather labor at his basement workbench, Peter at last gets to put the earphones on, flip the switch, and twiddle the dials. Through the crackling and sussurous static he detects the sounds of love and lust, joy and sorrow, hope and loss.
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.
Peter Leroy recalls a childhood journey of discovery that he made from the mouth of the Bolotomy River to its source, traveling with his best (and imaginary) friend Rodney "Raskol" Lodkochnikov. The journey begins with the work of turning a packing case (which Cap'n Andrew Leech intends to use, later, as a coffin) into a shallow-draft boat, it involves encounters with a philosophical vagrant and a gaggle of beautiful nymphs, and it ends with the metaphor of life as a river turned on its head. "Life on the Bolotomy concerns the river journey of Peter and his chum Raskolnikov to the source of the Bolotomy River - a riotous inversion of both Thoreau's Merrimack expedition and Huck 'n' Jim's Mississippi quest" John Stark Bellamy II, Cleveland Plain Dealer LENGTH: novella, approximately 20,000 words, 96 pages in the trade paperback edition