The Fox and the Clam

by Eric Kraft

Overview

Peter Leroy recalls his childhood friend Matthew Barber, a dour little boy who later appears, as an adult, in Reservations Recommended. 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.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940012367242
Publisher:	The Babbington Press
Publication date:	03/19/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	80
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Eric Kraft grew up in Babylon, New York, on the South Shore of Long Island, where he was for a time co-owner and co-captain of a clam boat, which sank. He met or invented the character Peter Leroy while dozing over a German lesson during his first year at Harvard. The following year, he married his muse, Madeline Canning; they have two sons. After earning a Master’s Degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Kraft taught school in the Boston area for a while, moonlighting as a rock music critic for the Boston Phoenix. Since then, he has undertaken a variety of hackwork to support the Kraft ménage and the writing of the voluminous work of fiction that he calls The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. He has been the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts; was, briefly, chairman of PEN New England; and has been awarded the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature.

Editorial Reviews

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.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer - John Stark Bellamy II

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

Vermont Sunday Magazine - Lee Pennock Huntington

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 w

The New Yorker - Anna Shapiro