Product Review

“Don Carpenter’s semi-”autobiographical Fridays at Enrico’s can be read as the swan song of the entire Love Generation.” —The New York Times Book Review
 
The author of A Hard Rain Falling and A Couple of Comedians, Don Carpenter was one of the finest novelists working in the west. When fellow author Richard Brautigan killed himself, Carpenter tried for some time to write a biography of his remarkable, deeply troubled friend.
 
He finally abandoned that in favor of writing a novel: Fridays at Enrico’s, the story of four writers living in San Francisco and Portland during the 50s and early 60s. The heady days of the Beat scene were a time of youth and opportunity, when the artists and bohemians were busy creating the groundwork for what came to be the counterculture.
 
Recently discovered in a complete penultimate manuscript, having been lost since the author’s death, Fridays at Enrico’s was edited and shaped by a great champion of Don Carpenter, Jonathan Lethem.
 
“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
 
“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, coauthor of Helter Skelter