Inflating a Dog (The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy) by Eric Kraft (novels to read for beginners .txt) 📗

teenager, he acquired considerable local fame as the “Birdboy of Babbington” after building a single-seat airplane in his family’s garage and flying it to New Mexico and back, an achievement that in later life he admitted had become considerably exaggerated in the telling. Leroy and his wife, Albertine Gaudet, for many years ran Small’s Hotel, on Small’s Island, in Bolotomy Bay, off Babbington. His extensive, ongoing memoirs, The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy, are thoroughly flavored with the voice and style of Leroy himself — a self-described “muddleheaded dreamer,” a rewriter of history, a man obsessed with the past as it was and as it might have been, the sly creator of his own salutary myth.

About the Author: Eric Kraft

Eric Kraft grew up in Babylon, New York, on the South Shore of Long Island, where he was for a time co-owner and co-captain of a clam boat, which sank. He met or invented the character Peter Leroy while dozing over a German lesson during his first year at Harvard. The following year, he married his muse, Madeline Canning; they have two sons. After earning a Master’s Degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Kraft taught school in the Boston area for a while, moonlighting as a rock music critic for the Boston Phoenix. Since then, he has undertaken a variety of hackwork to support the Kraft ménage and the writing of the voluminous work of fiction that he calls The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. He has been the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts; was, briefly, chairman of PEN New England; and has been awarded the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature.

www.erickraft.com

The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy, by Eric Kraft

The Personal History is one large work of fiction composed of many interconnected parts.

Its parts are the memoirs and collected works of a fictional character, Peter Leroy, who tells an alternative version of his life story; explores the effect of imagination on perception, memory, hope, and fear; holds a fun-house mirror to scenes of life in the United States; ruminates upon the nature of the universe and the role of human consciousness within it; and prods and probes the painful world of time and place in search of the niches where hilarity hides.

Little Follies

. . . containing the novellas My Mother Takes a Tumble, Do Clams Bite?, Life on the Bolotomy, The Static of the Spheres, The Fox and the Clam, The Girl with the White Fur Muff, Take the Long Way Home, Call Me Larry, and The Young Tars, in which Peter explores his earliest memory; probes the causes of his childhood pelecypodophobia (fear of bivalve mollusks); navigates the Bolotomy River; builds a radio receiver; ponders the differences between dour foxes and happy clams; falls in love; takes 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. “A masterpiece of American humor.” Los Angeles Times

Herb ’n’ Lorna

. . . in which Peter investigates and reconstructs the life stories of his maternal grandparents, Herb and Lorna Piper, a cuddly couple who invented the animated erotic jewelry business. “A classic. Savor it.” — Andrei Codrescu, National Public Radio (NPR)

Reservations Recommended

. . . in which Peter 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 and Bertram W. Beath, restaurant reviewer, by night. “Brilliant.” — LA Life

Where Do You Stop?

. . . in which Peter finally completes a junior-high-school science assignment, thirty years late, exploring 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. “Luminously intelligent fun.” — Time

What a Piece of Work I Am

. . . in which Peter, working on the principle of the panopticon, constructs a plausible life for Ariane Lodkochnikov, the sultry older sister of his imaginary childhood friend, maker of her own self and her own myth. “Conveys a sense of sheer play.”  — The New Yorker

At Home with the Glynns

. . . in which Peter receives his sexual initiation at the hands of the Glynn twins, becomes a sketch doctor, listens to tales about the night the Nevsky mansion burned, learns the value of hope, and discovers the love of his life. “A daring tour de force.”  — The New York Times Book Review

Leaving Small’s Hotel

. . . in which Peter reads the latest installment of his memoirs in fifty consecutive episodes, culminating on the night of his fiftieth birthday, while his wife, Albertine, tries to stop the old hotel they own from crumbling slowly around them. “One of the most delightful novels of the decade.”  — Kirkus Reviews

Inflating a Dog

. . . in which Peter tries to help his mother in a scheme to re-invent a sinking clamboat as an elegant cruising vessel. Each night he sneaks to the harbor and pumps the boat dry, inflating his mother’s hopes a bit longer. “Sentimental, loving, raucous, wise, and great fun.”  — Booklist

Passionate Spectator

. . . in which Peter, summoned for jury duty, allows his mind to wander into the mind of Matthew Barber, who finds himself in a Boston hospital, where he allows his mind to wander into the mind of Bertram W. Beath, who checks into a hotel in Miami’s South Beach and into a life as an erotic opportunist and passionate spectator of beauty and human folly. “Incisive prose and off-kilter wit.”  — Steve Smith, Time Out New York

Flying

. . . in which Peter sets out to give a full and frank account of his legendary flight from Babbington to New Mexico in a single-seat airplane that he built in the family garage during the summer of his fifteenth