Peck & Peck

Batter Gray is in his early twenties and living in New York City, and he wants to work in poetry. His classmates settled on doctor, lawyer, broker or engineer by the time they were eleven, and he worries about his future. Then Peck & Peck hires him.

Peck & Peck is a renowned poetry journal in New York City, and it is prestigious, secretive and dysfunctional in equal measure. Its thirty-nine editors, like Batter, hold that poetry carries the power of humanity and the key to its survival.

Batter is named after his mother's heroic dog. He is an identical twin whose brother died at birth, and that loss colours how he meets the pairs that shape ordinary life: right and wrong, truth and lies, rejection and acceptance.

The novel is a tender comic story about a young man finding his place in an odd institution. It keeps returning to one idea: every story has two sides, and perhaps a third.