Daring to Eat a Peach: A Novel
by Joseph Zeppetello
Fiction, Trade Paperback Original
ISBN 978-0-9845105-1-1
6 x 9 in / 240 pages
Publication Date: November 2010
“Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.”
-T.S. Eliot, “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock”
Denton Pike, a divorced translator, is stuck, stalled in a moment of inertia … until the reappearance of his old friend, Peter, a roving journalist, sets into motion a series of watershed events. Denton and his handful of thirty-something friends each face a choice: Seize the day and change your surroundings or bite your lip and perpetuate the status quo.
This finely crafted narrative explores the motivations and mettle of a close-knit group of 21st-century knowledge workers, and examines the interpretation of history, the translation of language, and most of all, the dynamics of modern-day relationships. It sheds a shadowy light on the crux of decision-making and investigates the conflicting forces that shape our daily lives.
With spare, tightly written sentences, Joseph Zeppetello’s debut novel sparkles with a Raymond Carver-like economic use of language. The effortless dialogue speaks volumes about human nature and illuminates man’s daily struggles to make the right choices in life.
Praise for Daring to Eat a Peach
“Life is both the choices we make and the accidents that happen to us; in Daring to Eat a Peach, Joseph Zeppetello captures both in fine fashion.”
-James Polk, owner of A New Leaf Bookstore and freelance reviewer for The New York Times
“It is difficult to believe that DARING TO EAT A PEACH is a first novel for author Joseph Zeppetello, so polished is the prose, so succinct the manner of communicating many characters in their interaction with members of their past and their present, so satisfying is the story he gradually unfolds.”
-Grady Harp, Amazon.com Top Reviewer
“If [T.S.] Eliot understood the increased self-deprecating nature of aging, Zeppetello animates the path along the way and you can’t help but smile. A triumphant first novel!”
-Florence Dee Boodakian, author of Resisting Nudities: A Study in the Aesthetics of Eroticism
“Zeppetello has something of the prolific Upton Sinclair in him, but his indignation is more cool than fervid. He is a keen observer of the culture…alluding to things we ought to know and may even claim to know but in fact have not absorbed.”
-Djelloul Marbrook, poet and author of Far From Algiers and Artemisia’s Wolf
About the Author
Joseph Zeppetello is the Director of Writing at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York. He lives in the Catskill Mountains. Daring to Eat a Peach is his first novel.