Fridays At Enrico's

Carpenter...wrote an offbeat classic about the Beat milieu...he left Fridays at Enrico's on the shelf as a generous parting gift. --New York Times Book Review Not just a nostalgia trip into the counterculture, this work vividly recalls a time and place in forthright, engaging language. --Library Journal His writing, about Portland pool hustlers, lady-killing comedians, and drug-sniffing screenwriters, is as radiant and surprising now as it was the moment it was written [...] his love for the West Coast, for old movies and cold beer, and, above all else, for writing, suffuses every page. --Grantland Fridays at Enrico's captures the literary and social scene of Northern California in quick, knowing portraits. --San Francisco Chronicle I don't suppose I'll ever get over my friend Don Carpenter's tragic death, but it helps more than a little that as his legacy he left us his best book: Fridays at Enrico's. --Curt Gentry, author of J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets, Helter Skelter Fridays At Enrico's may be the truest depiction of literary life I've ever encountered. Truer than Lost Illusions, truer thanNew Grub Street; Carpenter depicts the lives of his bohemians up and down the west coast with a kind of calm radiance, and with an equipoise between hope and despair. The result is a kind of stoic classic, like John Williams' Stoner. I can't recommend it highly enough. --Matthew Specktor, author of American Dream Machine and The Sting Like Chuck Kinder's Honeymooners, Fridays at Enrico's lovingly follows the literary fortunes of a ragtag band of West Coast hopefuls from their clumsy first drafts and drunken love affairs through bestsellerdom, writer's block and the Hollywood script mills. Don Carpenter knows how heartbreakingly funny the artist's peculiar unhappiness can be.' --Stewart O'Nan, author of Last Night at the Lobster and Emily, Alone The writer's life is a favorite subject for many authors, but Fridays at Enrico's is Don Carpenter from front to back--spare but unsparing, plain-spoken but filigreed with moments of bright poetry, and focused on ordinary people climbing out of the holes they're in only to dig deeper ones for themselves. Edited by Jonathan Lethem with a light and sympathetic touch, Carpenter's final novel is an unexpected treat. --Christopher Sorrentino, author of Trance, Believeniks!, and American Tempura