1: Little Follies Begins
This is the cover of the latest edition of Little Follies.
This is the book’s dedication:
For Mad
Shed thy faire beames into my feeble eyne,
And raise my thoughtes, too humble and too vile
Edmund Spenser
Prologue to Book One
My novel contains Peter Leroy’s memoir. This is his cover.
“Little Follies is a modern rarity: a sly and sweet-spirited meditation on childhood in which high art and sheer entertainment are gloriously one and the same. I envy the lucky souls who are meeting Peter Leroy for the first time.”
Armistead Maupin
“Little Follies reads like footloose light fiction, but the complexity of its fabric, and the precision of its effects, are the hallmarks of an artist who has made a serious commitment. . . . It generates its own . . . reality, and it’s profoundly funny. Although it’s doled out in short segments, the evolving landscape of this saga, this masterpiece of American humor, feels vast.”
David Chute, The Los Angeles Times
“With Peter at the helm, ‘rowing the waterways of memory,’ Kraft has found a narrative voice that is winningly antic and dazzlingly flexible. His self-contradictory stories-within- stories, far from being a mere technical exercise, are the ideal vehicle for this seriocomic meditation on the art of fiction, the nature of memory, and the many uses of clams.”
Michael Upchurch, The Washington Post
“Eric Kraft is one of our best writers, the author of two extraordinary novels—Herb ’n’ Lorna, a critical favorite, and the even more admirable Reservations Recommended, an urban fable told in the guise of restaurant reviews. Now Kraft has given us all of the Leroy stories. . . . They are quite as delightful as anything he has written.”
Roger Harris, The Newark Star-Ledger
“Kraft’s special talent is for creating characters and people familiar enough to empathize with but who inhabit a world all his own, located somewhere between our minds and his. . . . The result is complex and funny and sometimes touching and maybe sometimes even wise.
Jim Erickson, The Wichita Eagle
“Little Follies is, first and foremost, a consistently funny book. Kraft seems to have taken to heart Peter’s grandfather’s advice on writing, ‘make sure there’s a laugh on every page.’ There is. Sometimes it’s a short, sympathetic, share- the-remembered-pain-of-childhood laugh, sometimes a belly laugh at the absurdity of the situations in which Peter finds himself.”
David Dodd, San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle page 4
“Whimsy . . . mystery, tragedy, jealousy, love, wisdom, irony, wonder . . . you’ll read quickly and happily, eager to finish one story and get on to the next.”
James Idema, Chicago Tribune
“Kraft is widely regarded as a first-rate comic novelist, but this familiar categorization fails to account for his talents as a literary miniaturist and the creator of a highly eccentric, utterly self-contained imaginative world. . . . Little Follies represents the essential work of one of our most distinctive comic talents. For those unfamiliar with Kraft’s work, this is the logical place to begin.”
R. D. Pohl, The Buffalo News
“Little Follies is one of the funniest novels I have ever read. . . . As if the marvelous writing were not enough, the book is studded with delicious little chunks of material which are not exactly the novel itself. . . . If, as one of Mr. Kraft’s characters says, ‘childhood is like a moment on a mountaintop in the sunshine before we descend into the vale of tears,’ then this book is a long vacation at the peak.”
Michael Z. Jody, The East Hampton Star
“Mr. Kraft is no casual spinner of yarns. Within the framework of these artfully constructed stories, he has developed an ingenious investigation of the way we build our myths, private and public. . . . His readers can only hope that he continues to be seduced by his dreams, and that he keeps the promise at the end of the last novella in this collection: ‘To be continued.’”
Julie Salamon, The Wall Street Journal
“At times, reading Kraft is like stumbling across memories
of your own life, and yet the work is self-consciously— pointedly—literary. In effect, you’re always reading two stories: the manifest one, which is clever, anecdotal, suspenseful, and funny, and a mystery, full of clues about the construction of the very book you are reading. . . . The stories are a deceptively modest attempt to render the very substance of experience in its smallest, stop-action increments. . . . Kraft’s little follies are the work of an ardent reader, who gives others of his kind what they love most . . . In them, the world of the imagination and the world that produces cars, junk, and an opposite sex are a peaceable kingdom.”Anna Shapiro, The New Yorker
The Personal History continues in Episode 2.
You can listen to this episode on the Personal History podcast.
In Topical Guide 1, Mark Dorset considers Dorset, Mark and Personal History from this episode.