Flying

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 culture and return him to Babbington a hero. More than forty years later as Babbington is about to rebuild itself as a theme park commemorating his historic flight Peter must return home to set the record straight and confess that his flight did not match the legend that it inspired.Flying is an artful slyly intelligent wildly inventive and buoyant comedy of remarkable wingspan a hilarious story of hoaxes digressions do-it-yourself engineering and the wilds of memory-and a great satire of magical thinking in America.A reminder of how entertaining a novel can be when it slips the surly bonds of realism. . . . The effect is like a happy-go-lucky Nabokov with all the road-tripping wordplay and none of the incest. . . . Kraft's affectionately satirical buoyant language makes Flying soar. Radhika Jones TIMEBeneath its aw-shucks surface Flying is an ingenious at times dizzyingly self-inverting assault not only on the truth but on the concoction of palatable fictions as well. Its only inviolate god is the human imagination; it's a paean to flight by a boy who never left the ground except perhaps where it counts most: in his mind. Laura Miller The New York TimesEric Kraft is an oddball an eccentric a bit of a genius - the writerly equivalent of a dreamer who puts together weird and wonderful contraptions in his garage. . . . Kraft has made his career out of high-wire performance seizing on the merest hint or detail and spinning it into magic. . . . Flying . . . feels like Kraft's grandest achievement since Herb 'n' Lorna. Richard Rayner Los Angeles TimesIf you were to pick up a hitchhiking Jorge Luis Borges and Robert Pirsig or to listen as Thomas Pynchon recited Ulysses from memory over longnecks on J. D. Salinger's tab you might catch the flavor of Eric Kraft's work. Matthew Battles Barnes & Noble ReviewThat rare book that can change the way you look at the world.William McKeen St. Petersburg Times