Praise for Fridays at Enrico’s
“Not just a nostalgia trip into the counterculture, this work vividly recalls a time and place in forthright, engaging language.” — Library Journal
“Fridays at Enrico’s captures the literary and social scene of Northern California in quick, knowing portraits.”San Francisco Chronicle
“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. Though they occasionally wallow in life’s darker vices, Carpenter’s novels stand out for their resolute, hardscrabble sunniness.” —Grantland
“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 than New 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
Praise for Carpenter’s Hard Rain Falling
“Don Carpenter is a particular favorite of mine. His first novel, Hard Rain Falling, might be my candidate for the other best prison novel in American literature.”— Jonathan Lethem
“Carpenter’s masterpiece, long out of print, is the definitive juvenile—delinquency novel and a damning indictment of our justice system that is still relevant today.”— George Pelecanos, The Village Voice, screenwriter of The Wire
“Don Carpenter combines a reporter’s eye for external detail with a novelist’s sense of inner depts.”— Los Angeles Times
“Hard Rain Falling roars through dim Western streets like an articulate Hells Angel looking for a fight…The book is tough and vital, built with slabs of hard prose.”— The New York Times
“Full of lyrical evocations of a lost working—class San Francisco, the novel also contains possibly the best two—page drunken celebration of cheap, corny, vulgar, un—cleaned—up Market Street ever set in print.”— The San Francisco Chronicle
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