Leaving Small’s Hotel

Peter Leroy

In the seventh volume of his memoirs, Peter Leroy turns fifty and marks the occasion by reading the latest installment of his memoirs, Dead Air, in fifty consecutive episodes, one episode a night for fifty nights, culminating on the night of his birthday, while his wife, Albertine, tries to squeeze a living from the old hotel they own and to stop it from crumbling slowly around them.

Small’s Hotel, on a little island off Long Island, is where Peter and his wife, Albertine, have spent most of their adult lives. Albertine runs the hotel while Peter works quietly on his memoirs, but the future of the hotel, and of every gift Peter dreams of giving Albertine, is in jeopardy. What he does to save the hotel is the story of this book. It involves storytelling, friendship, memory, ghostwriting, real-estate, electrical contraptions, and great, abiding love. 

“A compact comic Decameron, a deadpan fantasia . . . one of the most delightful novels of the decade.”
     Kirkus Reviews

“With his customary elegance, Kraft has written a coda to the utopian impulses that lurk in the heart of our century.”
     Publishers Weekly

“Kraft’s take on the national experience is thoughtful,disturbing, and unlike that of any other American writer.”
     Anthony Brandt, Men’s Journal

“Each apparently innocent anecdote chimes with Kraft’s broader theme of the imagined life, of its thrilling, enhancing, and ultimately dangerous connection to the real.”
     Claire Messud, Newsday

“The belief has long been held here that Eric Kraft is one of our best writers, and Leaving Small’s Hotel reinforces it.”
     Roger Harris, Newark Star-Ledger

“Refreshingly complex and searching.”
     Mahinder Kingra, City Paper (Baltimore)

“A wonderful matryoshka of a novel . . . with just the sort of spectacular intricacy that makes a business fail and a
novel fly.”
     The New Yorker

Picador USA (1999)
Paperback: 352 pages
$ 14.00