The Fox and the Clam

Peter 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.


"The Fox and the Clam is a wonderfully wacky ringing of plot changes on the kind of idiotically moralistic fables that used to fill the pages of elementary school readers." — John Stark Bellamy II, The Cleveland Plain Dealer


"The Fox and the Clam tells us how Peter learned to read, with many versions of the Fable of the Fox and the Clam; here Peter plays Candide to his cynical classmate Matthew Barber; it is all about happiness and despair, and it is exceedingly wise and exceedingly funny." — Lee Pennock Huntington, Vermont Sunday Magazine


"Clamming is the chief industry of Babbington; the town’s driveways are paved with crushed clamshells, and shapely shells are recycled as knickknacks by Bivalve Byproducts. . . . The apotheosis of clamdom is reached in 'The Fox and the Clam,' in which the clam clearly represents only one thing — being happy-as-a — but does so in a set of thematic variations (ranging from a Saturday-afternoon cartoon about a happy hippo and an unhappy one to a deadly competition having to do with skipping third grade) that raise complicated farce to the level of calculus." — Anna Shapiro, The New Yorker


“[Kraft’s Peter Leroy] series is smart, funny, warmly inviting, and delightfully impossible to define.” 

Kate Bernheimer, The Oregonian


“Eric Kraft’s essential subject is suburban boyhood—in particular, that moment when it loses its innocence. . . . Like Lawrence Sterne, Kraft is unashamedly sentimental, digressive, and extremely funny; like Proust, profoundly nostalgic and obsessed with loss.  The typical Kraft novel is a laugh-out-loud read with undertones of grief and ruefulness.  Almost all of his books revolve around a single individual, Peter Leroy, who is now . . . as fully realized as any character in current American literature. . . . Under the surface humor, Kraft’s take on the national experience is thoughtful, disturbing, and unlike that of any other American writer.”  

Anthony Brandt, Men’s Journal


“The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy is one of the biggest, funniest, sweetest, and looniest undertakings in contemporary American fiction.”

John Strausbaugh, New York Press


“[The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy] is one of the cleverest and most charming literary enterprises in recent American fiction.” 

Mahinder Kingra, The City Paper (Baltimore)


“Is there a more beguiling writer today than Eric Kraft?” 

Publishers Weekly


Cover art: Winslow Homer, The Fog Warning (1885, detail)


LENGTH: novella, approximately 20,000 words, 96 pages in the trade paperback edition