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This volume highlights the variety of forms comedy took in England, with reference to developments in Europe, particularly France, during the European Enlightenment. It argues that comedy in this period is characterized by wit, satire, and humor, provoking both laughter and sympathetic tears. Comic expression in the Enlightenment reflects continuities and engagements with the comedy of previous eras, it is also noted for new forms and preoccup...

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 ...

Peter Leroy explores his earliest memories, which involve a next-door neighbor with a shady occupation, a shapely blonde (a product of his imagination), six kittens and one red wagon, and his mother's tumble from her lawn chair. MY MOTHER TAKES A TUMBLE is included in LITTLE FOLLIES. However, it is also available on its own as a pocket-size paperback.

Peter Leroy recalls an episode from his grade-school years, an episode that he would really rather forget, one of the dark, gritty bits that one finds at the bottom of the chowder bowl of life. It involves the Young Tars, an organization originally intended to raise the morale of students at the new Babbington Central Upper Elementary School, and the treacherous Mr. Summers, a teacher whose armamentarium of instructional techniques featured "h...

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 t...

Leroy recalls his childhood friend Matthew Barber. Peter and Matthew seem unlikely friends. Matthew finds little to like in life, and his outlook is decidedly blue. Peter finds much to like in life, though nearly everything puzzles him, and he is essentially sanguine about his future, no matter how groundless his optimism might be. Eventually the friends find, as most friends do, that each has added to his developing self a little of the other...

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 d...

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 ...

Peter Leroy recalls his childhood affection for the Larry Peters series of adventure books. As a boy, he entered the world of the books so completely that he went from wanting to be Larry Peters to believing, sometimes, that he was. As Larry, he relished the company of his wisecracking sister Lucy and his square-jawed and capable pal, Rocky King. Later, when he had become a grownup, circumstances led to his taking his place as the last in a li...

This volume highlights the variety of forms comedy took in England, with reference to developments in Europe, particularly France, during the European Enlightenment. It argues that comedy in this period is characterized by wit, satire, and humor, provoking both laughter and sympathetic tears. Comic expression in the Enlightenment reflects continuities and engagements with the comedy of previous eras, it is also noted for new forms and preoccup...

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 cult...

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 se...

Small?s Hotel, on a little island off Long Island, is where Peter and his wife, Albertine, have spent most of their adult lives. Albertine runs the hotel while Peter works quietly on his memoirs, but the future of the hotel, and of every gift Peter dreams of giving Albertine, is in jeopardy.What Peter does to save the hotel, his marriage, and possibly his life involves storytelling, friendship, memory, ghostwriting, real-estate, electrical con...

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-dou...

On the surface, Herb and LornaÕs story seems like an American myth: small-town origins, Jazz Age romance, Depression trials, and postwar prosperity. By the 1950s, they seem to be a typically sunny American couple. Herb sells Studebakers to the citizens of Babbington, a Long Island seaside town, and Lorna is his cheerfully coy and clever wife. However, after Herb and Lorna have died, their grandson, Peter Leroy, discovers, Òthat my maternal gra...

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, h...

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 throug...

Clever, anecdotal, suspenseful, and funny."      Anna Shapiro, The New Yorker To read a sample, click "Preview" below the cover image. 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 th...

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, no...

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 lifeÕs Big Questions, and his memories of his intoxicating science teacher, Miss Rheingold."A magical, funny, healing journey."Publishers Weekly (starred review)"Warm . . . thought-provoking . . . charming . . . delightful."Library Journ...