In 1962, as a college sophomore, Eric Kraft fell asleep in the library. Among the books surrounding him, he began to dream...of a nameless boy, sitting on a dilapidated dock in the warm sun of a summer day, playing a He was trying to bring the soles of his bare feet as close as he could to the surface of the water, without touching it. That boy became Peter Leroy, and from Kraft's dream grew one of the most delightful, unusual projects in contemporary literature. Funny, touching, witty, mythic, and profound, Kraft's novels, featuring Peter, his friends and family, and the seaside town of Babbington create an alternate reality-a world in which we see ourselves, darkened and wavering, as reflected by deep water. Little Follies gathers nine Peter Leroy novellas into one the perfect introduction to an irresistible cycle of books by an author sometimes compared to Cheever, Proust, Twain, Borges, Russel Baker, and Garrison Keillor, but who is uniquely Eric Kraft.

On the surface Herb and Lorna Piper are typically sunny 1950s American adults. Herbs sells Sudebakers to the citizens of Bebbington, a Long Island seaside town, and Lorna is his cheerfully coy and clever wife. Their story seems like an American small-town origins, Jazz Age romance, Depression trials, postwar prosperity. But this book begins with the shocking, wondrous discovery, made by their grandson Peter Leroy after their death, "that my maternal grandparents were involved in—virtually the creators of—the animated erotic jewelry industry." And from that moment the story of Herb and Lorna takes on a tone of mingled awe and delight, propelled by a pair of secrets that dovetail, at the end, into a luscious and bawdy revelation.

Reservations Recommended is many 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 with a grace rare among contemporary writers. Matthew Barber is a pseudonymous Boston restaurant reviewer who between (and sometimes during) meals at local eateries conducts affairs with ladies of his acquaintance—affairs mental as much as carnal. We watch as Barber descends from his self-protective superiority into a species of madness, careening toward an ending of stark moral ambiguity. Woven throughout with Barber's own hilariously acid reviews, Reservations Recommended is Eric Kraft's most fearless venture into the dark night of the soul.

"Where do you stop?" is the question posed by Miss Rheingold, the intoxicating new teacher of Peter Leroy's junior high school class. That question forms the basis of a science paper that Peter spends thirty years trying to complete-along the way exploring quantum physics, entropy, epistemology, principles of uncertainty and discontinuity, and a range of Life's Big Questions. Deceptively simple and warmly engaging, Eric Kraft's novel is an ingenious portrait of a small American town in the 1950s, when the atom seemed to hold the key to the mystery of creation, as well as the power to utterly destroy it.

Meet Ariane Lodkochnikov: clam-bar waitress, avant-garde actress, 1950s small-town bad girl, causeless rebel, boyhood crush, and ideal figment of the imagination of Peter Leroy. Peter is the engaging narrator of this novel; Ariane is the unreliable narrator of her own life. With Peter listening raptly, she weaves a tale of voyages—some erotic, some poignant, some hilariously disastrous, all leading her back to the seaside town of Babbington. Eric Kraft's novels featuring Peter Leroy offer more than meets the eye, and What a Piece of Work I Am is a treasure trove for readers: a woman's quest to escape her reputation, an echo-chamber of myth, and a fascinating meditiation on the human urge to tell and hear stories.

Kraft's most inventive and downright fun novel yet. "A real delight. Peter Leroy's world shines through just like childhood both tiny and enormous, full of mystery and wonder."—Robert Plunket, New York Times Book Review. Black-and-white photographs.

With this, his seventh novel, Eric Kraft once again gives readers and critics everywhere a reason to Kirkus declared it "one of the most delightful novels of the decade," while Publishers Weekly asked, "Is there a more beguiling writer today than Eric Kraft?" Small's Hotel is where Peter and Albertine Leroy have spent their lives, hosting visitors while Peter works on his memoirs. But as guests grow harder to come by the future of the hotel—and of every gift Peter ever dreamed of giving his wife—is in jeopardy. What he does to save his marriage is a story involving friendship, childhood, gadgets, and great, abiding love.

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 to buy a run-down clamboat and reinvent it as an elegant cruising vessel for summer people in the beach town of Babbington, Long Island. But after Arcinella is purchased, Peter discovers that it is slowly sinking—and so each night he sneaks from his home to the harborfront, where he pumps the boat dry and so inflates his mother’s hopes a bit longer.

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 Memoirs While You Wait, a writing service designed to satisfy the contemporary compulsion for confession and self-revelation. That book opens into a beguiling journey from fiction to truth and back again, involving Peter, his childhood friend Matthew Barber (a pseudonymous restaurant reviewer who is undergoing emergency heart surgery), and Matthew's witty, urbane alter-ego, Bertram W. Beath-an erotic opportunist and "passionate spectator" of beauty and human folly. As Peter solicits potential clients for his service, he finds that autobiography requires a measure of deception-well, lying-and that his own life depends on fictions he has created and sustained. Eric Kraft is a novelist like no other, and his books featuring Peter Leroy create an irresistible world where poignancy and nostalgia blend with humor and unbridled invention-a world like our own, but somehow brighter, less predictable, and more fun. Kirkus Reviews Kraft woolgathers with an energy that would shame a sheep-shearer, and overhearing Peter's evening conversations over martinis with the ineffable Albertine is almost as good as listening to Fibber McGee and Molly on the radio again. More of the same, and may it go on forever. Mark Twain and Will Rogers would have felt right at home with the Leroys.

Critics have compared him to Proust, Pynchon, and Fred Astaire—an artful, slyly intelligent, wildly inventive observer of Americana. Now Eric Kraft has landed an ambitious comedy set both in our present and in an alternative 1950s universe—Flying . It is the tail end of the 1950s, and in the town of Babbington, New York, 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 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. Drawing together Eric Kraft's previously published Taking Off and On the Wing with the brand-new final part of the story, Flying Home, Flying is a 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.

Peter Leroy recalls the trouble that ensued when a well-meaning teacher appointed him director of Babbington’s annual fourth-grade production of King Lear. Three of his classmates wanted the role of Lear’s loving daughter, Cordelia, and each had her strategy for ensuring that she got it. Clarissa Bud, the girl with the white fur muff, used sweetness and charm; Veronica McCall used sex; and Lily O’Grady, known as Spike, threatened to break his foot if he chose anyone but her.

Book by Kraft, Eric