"Kraft's unpretentious parodies of contemporary society and its affectations are the best thing about Flying, shrewd enough to delight any aficionados of postmodern fiction who can get past the novel's Leave It to Beaver facade . . . Beneath 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 Times

"Eric 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. For almost 30 years, and through many books, he has been crafting The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences and Observations of Peter Leroy, a series of fictions framed as memoir, or maybe they're just fictionalized memoir, bits of life seen in a dizzying metafictional mirror. Reading these books and trying to figure out where Kraft stops and Leroy begins is part of the mystery here, and part of the fun. 'The usual descriptions—author and character, ventriloquist and dummy, left brain and right brain—are inaccurate and inadequate,' Kraft has said, muddying the waters with typical playfulness. 'He calls me Peter Leroy. I call him Eric Kraft. He thinks he invented me. I think I invented him.' Kraft puts on Leroy the way Charlie Chaplin used to don the tramp suit. Kraft plays the clown, but something essential and transformative is also at stake. His latest book Flying collects a new work, Flying Home, with the previously published Taking Off and On The Wing to complete a trilogy that examines and refracts a loony adventure from Leroy's adolescence—the time he built a flying motorcycle, an 'aerocycle,' and used the machine for a cross-country trip from Long Island to New Mexico. The exploit led to the fame that the young Leroy craved, and thereafter he was known in his hometown as the 'Birdboy of Babbington,' 'the teenage hero' of 'a cozy bayside community.' In fact, an older Leroy now reveals, this celebrity grew and continued out of mistake, a fraud almost—the sad reality being that the aerocycle never did get airborne but chugged along on the ground. Flying interweaves Leroy's giddy tall-tale telling of what might or might not actually have happened (with Leroy, an unreliable narrator par excellence, we're never quite sure) with the story of how he and his wife Albertine set out to retrace the route he took all those years ago. For the purpose of this second trip a new car is required, or rather, demanded (by the loyal, lovely and willful Albertine), prompting a Leroy trademark, the digression. This one concerns the couple's history with snazzy, speedy, yet somehow always malfunctioning automobiles that are like 'driving inside a hi-fi speaker during a fuzz bass solo.' 'We had in those days a naïve belief that somewhere there was a reliable British sports car that we could purchase, used, for a reasonable price. Perhaps that belief seems ludicrous to you. Perhaps you cannot imagine that two intelligent young people—which we then were—could labor under such an absurd delusion. If you feel that way, I just want to inform you—or remind you—that a large segment of the population of the United States believes that the sun revolves around the earth,' he says. 'As we traded in, we traded up. We would rid ourselves of one limping sports car and promptly buy another that was more powerful, more expensive, and more difficult to keep running. We always had an automobile loan, and the balance kept increasing. Little by little, we progressed from one of the most basic sports cars, a Benson-Greeley Gnome, to one of the most sophisticated, the powerful Kramler.' It's a hilarious passage, and a clue, perhaps, to the Kraft/Leroy relationship. The reality-based wit—'limping sports car'—feels like it might come from observation, from Kraft's own life, whereas the soaring madcap verbal fantasy of that splendid 'Benson-Greeley Gnome' is pure Leroy. Flying abounds in such dizzying moments, writing that looks easy enough but in most writers' hands falls to Earth with a clunk and a thud. Kraft has made his career out of high-wire performance, seizing on the merest hint or detail and spinning it into magic. 'Everywhere in our path lay items awaiting salvage,' says Leroy, describing a nighttime visit to a wrecker's yard in the hunt for motorcycle parts. 'Junk, one might say, but why demean it by calling it that? What