Peter Leroy receives his sexual initiation at the hands of the Glynn twins, becomes a sketch doctor, listens to many tales about the night the Nevsky mansion burned, learns the value of hope, and discovers the love of his life. As is usual with Peter's recollections, we are never certain where memory ends and imagination begins-but we are certain that we are reading the work of a brilliant memoirist who reconstructs his past with wry humor, nostalgia, satire, and dazzling invention. "A witty and wildly digressive epistemological examination in the form of a childhood reminiscence." The New Yorker "Wholly engaging . . . a daring tour de force." Jonathan Baumbach, The New York Times Book Review "One of the more hilariously erotic pieces of writing since Lolita." Edward Hannibal, The East Hampton Star

Peter Leroy constructs a plausible adult life for his grade school chum Matthew Barber, now living in Boston, where he is vice-president of a toy company by day, but becomes Bertram W. Beath, restaurant reviewer, when the sun goes down. Reservations Recommended is a satire of the critical mind; a dark commentary on contemporary culture; a story of midlife crisis; a morality play; and a book that matches bleakness against humor, seasoned throughout with B. W. Beath's hilariously acid reviews. We watch as Matthew Barber descends from a self-protective superiority into a species of madness, and into the dark night of the soul. "A brilliant satire." LA Life "A merciless sendup of contemporary American pretensions.' Janice Harayda, Cleveland Plain Dealer "Wonderfully readable . . . touching and intelligent." Richard Gehr, The Village Voice

Peter Leroy struggles to win the affections of the toothsome Patti Fiorenza while keeping his mother's hopes and his mother's boat afloat. Ella Leroy dreams of escaping the dreary routine of her 1950s wife-and-mom life. Without telling her husband, she enlists her son Peter and his locally-notorious girlfriend Patti in a scheme to buy a run-down clamboat and re-invent it as an elegant cruising vessel for summer people in the bayside town of Babbington, Long Island. But after they've bought the boat, Peter discovers that it is slowly sinking. "Raucous, wise, and great fun, this is simply not to be missed." Nancy Pearl, Booklist "The secret dreams and yearnings of a soul in the making, a fool for beauty." Frederic Koeppel, Memphis Commercial Appeal "Fascinating and sophisticated." Jennifer Reese, The New York Times Book Review "The best description of sex appeal anywhere, ever." Peter Jon Shuler

An "extraordinary" debut memoir of first love, identity, and self-discovery among a group of friends who became family in a Montauk summer house (Andrew Solomon, National Book Award winner). They call Montauk the end of the world, a spit of land jutting into the Atlantic. The house was a ramshackle split-level set on a hill, and each summer thirty-one people would sleep between its thin walls and shag carpets. Against the moonlight the house's octagonal roof resembled a bee's nest. It was dubbed The Hive. In 2013, John Glynn joined the share house. Packing his duffel for that first Memorial Day Weekend, he prayed for clarity. At twenty-seven, he was crippled by an all-encompassing loneliness, a feeling he had carried in his heart for as long as he could remember. John didn't understand the loneliness. He just knew it was there. Like the moon gone dark. Out East is the portrait of a summer, of The Hive and the people who lived in it, and John's own reckoning with a half-formed sense of self. From Memorial Day to Labor Day, The Hive was a center of gravity, a port of call, a home. Friendships, conflicts, secrets and epiphanies blossomed within this tightly woven friend group and came to define how they would live out the rest of their twenties and beyond. Blending the sand-strewn milieu of George Howe Colt's The Big House with the radiant aching of Olivia Liang's The Lonely City, Out East is a keenly wrought story of love and transformation, longing and escape in our own contemporary moment. "An unforgettable story told with feeling and humor and above all with the razor-sharp skill of a delicate and highly gifted writer." -- André Aciman, New York Times bestselling author of Call Me by Your Name "Out East is full of intimacy and hope and frustration and joy, an extraordinary tale of emotional awakening and lacerating ambivalence, a confession of self-doubt that becomes self-knowledge." -- Andrew Solomon, National Book Award winner An Entertainment Weekly Best Book of May 2019A Time magazine Best Book of May 2019Cosmopolitan Best Book of May 2019An O, the Oprah Magazine Best LGBTQ Book of 2019

Peter Leroy finally completes a junior-high-school science assignment, thirty years late, exploring along the way quantum physics, entropy, epistemology, principles of uncertainty and discontinuity, a range of life's Big Questions, and his memories of his intoxicating science teacher, Miss Rheingold. "Warm . . . thought-provoking . . . charming . . . delightful." Library Journal (starred review) "A book designed to leave its readers-and it deserves many of them-as happy as clams." Walter Satterthwait, The New York Times Book Review "Luminously intelligent fun." Time

The book examines the fortunes of a provincial, entrepreneurial family, the Glynns of Kilrush, County Clare, who came to local prominence in the early years of the nineteenth-century. It explores their networking strategies and acumen, and traces the rapid expansion of their business activity from small-scale corn millers to proprietors of a multifaceted enterprise. It examines the rapid expansion of their various enterprises from milling to shipping and railways. Paul O'Brien places the Glynn family and businesses within the wider context of networks developing between the urban, provincial and metropolitan industrial class. Networks which helped shape Irish society and its economy. It examines the family primarily from a social point of view while also exploring the family's business and trade enterprises. It addresses the issue of middle-class identity, examining the ways in which it was constructed and represented to the wider community. The book also explores the mechanisms that were used by the middle classes to establish and maintain their economic, social and cultural hegemony, and how these were reproduced down the Glynn generations. The book was helped by the availability of a superb, hitherto undiscovered, family and business archive belonging to the Glynn family. The most fascinating aspects discussed in the book are the interactions between class, networking, local administration, associational culture, education, religion, the Glynn women and last, but by no means least, the town of Kilrush itself where the family still remain based.

Leroy considers the origins of his childhood pelecypodophobia (the fear of bivalve mollusks), meets the imaginary friend who will remain his best friend for life, memorizes the legends of his ancestors in the Leroy line (including Black Jacques Leroy, who "invented beer"), studies his father's nude photographs of family friend May Castle, and enjoys a moonlight swim with Margot and Martha, the Glynn twins, after which he concludes that clams do not bite.