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...
In Passionate Spectator, memoirist Peter Leroy and his wife Albertine are living by the skin of their teeth in Manhattan. Casting about for ...
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 finally completes a junior-high-school science assignment, thirty years late, exploring along the way quantum physics, entropy, epistemolo...
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...
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 ...
" 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...
" 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 o...
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...
Peter Leroy explores one of his earliest memories, his mother's tumble from her lawn chair; probes the root causes of his childhood pelecypodophobia (...
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. However, after Herb and Lorna have died their grandson, Peter Leroy, discovers, "that my maternal grandparents were involved in-virtually the creators of-the animated erotic jewelry industry." "Herb 'n' Lorna is a historical farce, a comedy of four generations of...
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...
