Taking Off

One day, middle-aged Manhattanite Peter Leroy receives an unsettling postcard from a childhood classmate. With his wife, Albertine, he returns to his hometown of Babbington, Long Island, and finds it both transformed and strangely the same.
For Babbington has been "redefined" as a theme park, in a scheme to draw tourists to the struggling community, complete with trained actors, cultural interpreters, and carefully designed simulations of small-town 1950s life. On the wall of Legends restaurant, Peter sees his own commemoration: a picture of the triumphant day when, as a fifteen-year-old boy, he landed on Babbington's Main Street in the aerocycle he had built in his parents' garage, having flown four thousand miles to New Mexico and back.
Hailed in newspapers as the "Birdboy of Babbington," the youthful inventor reveled in his fame---but never disclosed the truth behind his flight. Now Peter wants to set the record straight---and with Albertine as his muse and conscience, he begins.
"Taking Off" is the first in a trilogy of novels about Peter Leroy's magical flight and its digressions along the way. Funny, warm, wise, and artful, this book---like all of its companion novels about Peter and his world---explores matters little and large with a light touch. Readers familiar with and new to these novels will delight in the wide-ranging invention and imagination of Peter's creator, Eric Kraft.


About the Author :
Eric Kraft has taught school, written textbooks, and was co-captain of a clam boat, which sank. He was the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and has been awarded the John Dos Passos prize for Literature. The author of nine previous novels, he and his wife live in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Review :
Praise for Eric Kraft and his Peter Leroy Novels
"An ever-evolving comic masterpiece. Beneath the dazzling comic antics, Kraft has a serious purpose: to investigate the nature and interaction of memory, reality, and invention."---Michael Upchurch, "The Seattle Times"
"Mr. Kraft's work is a weird wonder, successfully mating tales from the kind of small-town life that hardly exists anymore with a never-ending examination of what it's like to create such a world. In an age when computer technology is on the verge of unleashing the all-singing, all-dancing novel, Eric Kraft's true theme, the awesome power of the low-tech human imagination, has never seemed so timely or so wise."---Karen Karbo, "The New York Times Book Review"
"This series is smart, funny, warmly inviting, and delightfully impossible to define."
---Kate Bernheimer, "The Oregonian"
" "
"The only American author since Pynchon to completely erase the line between the literary novel and the spit-out-your-coffee comedy."
---Andrew Ervin, "The Washington Post"
" "
"The literary equivalent of Fred Astaire dancing: great art that looks like fun."
---Malcolm Jones, "Newsweek "
Praise for Eric Kraft and his Peter Leroy Novels

"An ever-evolving comic masterpiece. Beneath the dazzling comic antics, Kraft has a serious purpose: to investigate the nature and interaction of memory, reality, and invention."---Michael Upchurch, "The Seattle Times"

"Mr. Kraft's work is a weird wonder, successfully mating tales from the kind of small-town life that hardly exists anymore with a never-ending examination of what it's like to create such a world. In an age when computer technology is on the verge of unleashing the all-singing, all-dancing novel, Eric Kraft's true theme, the awesome power of the low-tech human imagination, has never seemed so timely or so wise."---Karen Karbo, "The New York Times Book Review"

"This series is smart, funny, warmly inviting, and delightfully impossible to define."
---Kate Bernheimer, "The Oregonian"
" "
"The only American author since Pynchon to completely erase the line between the literary novel and the spit-out-your-coffee comedy."
---Andrew Ervin, "The Washington Post"
" "
"The literary equivalent of Fred Astaire dancing: great art that looks like fun."
---Malcolm Jones, "Newsweek "