Book.of.the.Moment reviews Richard Grayson's AND TO THINK THAT HE KISSED HIM ON LORIMER STREET

On December 13, 2006, Book.of.the.Moment on MySpace reviewed Richard Grayson's And to Think That He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street:

About Richard Grayson's collection: His sense of humor is unlike any I've encountered before, and he expresses his wit through his creation of a diverse group of characters. "And to Think That he Kissed Him on Lorimer Street" introduces characters such as a teenage lesbian from Uzbekistan, and a black gay college student who debates poisoning his Pakistani roommate's therapy monkey. Grayson skillfully expands on his memories of the past with a pop culture study of sorts..weaving his past memories into his observations and experiences in the here and now. All this is done with a wit that caused me to laugh out loud.

Matt Bell reviews Richard Grayson's WRITE-IN: DIARY OF A CONGRESSIONAL CANDIDATE IN FLORIDA'S FOURTH CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT

Matt Bell reviewed Richard Grayson's WRITE-IN: Diary of a Congressional Candidate in Florida's Fourth Congressional District on his blog on December 4, 2006:

In 2004, Richard Grayson (author of With Hitler in New York and And To Think He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street) ran as a write-in Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives against a firmly entrenched Republican incumbent. His opponent, Republican Representative Ander Crenshaw, is almost abstract in his role as antagonist, having enough funding, support, and staff that defending his seat barely requires he even take notice of Grayson, who has no staff, no funding, and, at least, initially, no support. It's to Grayson's great credit that although he always knows what the outcome will be in his race for the House, he still puts an admirable amount of effort and time into reaching each potential supporter he comes across.

Grayson originally chronicled his race online for McSweeney's Internet Tendency (where you can still read the entire manuscript), and has republished his diary in book form. Here's an excerpt from the first entry from Grayson's book:

I'm the only registered Democrat in the race. But, unable to afford the nine-thousand-dollar filing fee to get the official party designation, I'm a write-in candidate. Under Florida's bizarre election laws, write-in votes count only if they're for "qualified" candidates like me.

If I weren't a candidate, Congressman Crenshaw's name wouldn't be on the November ballot. There just wouldn't be an election. Four of Florida's twenty-five House members were elected this afternoon when they did not get a primary or write-in opponent.

Over 90 percent of Americans live in congressional districts that are essentially one-party monopolies. Of Florida's twenty-five House seats, seven are safe for Democrats, and sixteen are safe for Republicans.

The Fourth is the most Republican district in the state. But I'm hoping to give anyone opposed to Crenshaw's positions a chance to vote for someone else.

In the last Congress, Crenshaw voted for more Bush tax cuts and the war in Iraq. He supported oil development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, limiting the Patients' Bill of Rights, and banning "partial-birth" abortion. Crenshaw voted against campaign-finance reform.

As of March, his campaign committee had $612,691 in cash.

Mine had bupkis.

Grayson writes with a self-deprecating wit and a keen eye for the realities of both our overall political situation and that of Florida's Fourth District, where his campaign takes place. Times move fast, and after the semi-uplifting Democratic victory this past November, it may be hard to remember exactly how bleak things felt for progressive or Democratic voters in late 2004, but Grayson's diary, written in the heat of the moment, manages to chronicle not only the desperate backdrop of that election but also the awakening sense of progressive community that was nearly destroyed by the spirit-crushing reelection of George W. Bush and his Congress. Grayson writes much like he ran for the House, in that he isn't so much trying to convert us as voters as much as he is trying to show us that we do still have options when he vote, despite what our political situation seems to allow.

When asked what he'll do to support traditional marriage, Grayson says he'll kill Liza Minelli. His favorite part of living in Florida's beautiful Fourth District? "The hurricanes." He tells the same reporter that he's "too lazy to be in Congress," because "it's a lot of work." Openly transgressive when answering reporters and filling out lobbyist group questionnaire, Grayson couches every answer in a wit that's as cynically sarcastic as it is big-hearted, leading to the confusion of his interviewers and friendly recognition on the part of this reader, whose contradictory feelings of cynicism and optimism from 2004 were both crushed and vindicated by the final results of that election.

Clocking in at just over one hundred pages, Grayson's Diary of a Congressional Candidate in Florida's Fourth Congressional District is a deceptively quick read. Still, it's bigger than it looks. I finished the book in a single evening, but have found myself returning to it to enjoy not only the absurdity of the political situations but also the fine humor of Grayson's prose and the sense of comradery that permeates every page. He so openly shares the details of his ironic, winking candidacy that it's impossible not to cheer him on. Towards the end, a voter writes Grayson a letter thanking him for trying that the voter signs "your constituent," a sentiment that I too felt by the time I turned the final page. Although Grayson lost the race, his book tells it like a victory march, celebrating every small triumph won against impossible odds.

I couldn't agree more.

Monday Night at Mo Pitkin's: AVERY reading with Dominic Preziosi and Richard Grayson

At Mo Pitkin's House of Satisfaction on Monday, November 27, 2006, at 7 p.m. there was a reading for the inaugural issue of Avery: An Anthology of New Fiction with contributors Dominic Preziosi and Richard Grayson. It was part of Mo Pitkin's Reader's Room series.

Here's the post by editor Andrew Palmer from the Avery blog on November 29:

Andrew: Avery takes on New York

Avery pulled off a big coup earlier this month when Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope: All-Story cancelled a reading in Manhattan and Avery was invited to take their place. The reading went down with a healthy dose of fanfare this Monday night on the second floor at Mo Pitkin's House of Satisfaction in East Village--a small, wood-panelled, night-clubby, noirish room with three long tables stretching from a curtained stage to the back of the room. It seemed to me to be about half-full--a more than respectable turnout for a new literary anthology that hasn't even been published yet. Leigh Newman, one of our writers (and our informant for this reading series) hosted, I nervously said a few words about Avery, and then I gave up the floor to our two readers for the night--Avery contributors Dominic Preziosi and Richard Grayson, both of whom I was meeting for the first time.

Dominic held us in thrall with his Avery story about a man and a woman in a hauntingly familiar semi-post-apocalyptic Manhattan. The first sentence is "In the aftermath of everything we meet up with the one-eyed priest." Now we're listening!

Richard read, in an appropriately neurotic, hyper-self-conscious voice, his Avery story about, about . . . . it seems to be about trailing off, about starting things and never being able to finish them--whether it's a PhD thesis or sexual intercourse or a hamburger. In any case it's hilarious, and everyone laughed a lot. My favorite part is where the narrator--oh I'll just quote it:

When I was young, Rilke admonished me nearly all the time. That “You must change your life” written so earnestly.
But mostly I was tired and preferred to close my eyes.
You must, Rilke would say.
But I just can’t now, not right now, I thought.
You must change, he said.
Tomorrow. Tomorrow I’ll do it.
Change your life, he kept saying.
Yes, yes. But not at this minute.
Your life, Rilke said.
So I reached for my pills, the little red triangular ones, the ones that helped me sleep. I swallowed two of them without water, and Rilke became silent.

Brilliant, Richard. Thanks again, really many many thanks, to Richard and Dominic for providing the meat of the entertainment on Monday--and of course to Leigh for hosting. (If you're in New York you need to check out the weekly Reading Room series at Mo Pitkin's.) We got the word out to a few more people, made a couple more connections, and had a wonderful time.

Flatbush Life and Kings Courier cover Richard Grayson's AND TO THINK THAT HE KISSED HIM ON LORIMER STREET

Flatbush Life and Kings Courier report on Richard Grayson's And to Think That He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street was the subject of an article today (November 20, 2006):

'Lorimer Street' Writer Turns the Pages on Brooklyn

by Helen Klein

Here [is]autobiography seen through the lens of fiction, fiction created through the maze of past life re-imagined – not Proust, considerably less dense, for one thing, but certainly not the unProust.

This is not to say that the stories in Lorimer Street are inaccessible to anyone who did not share Grayson’s college days or his clearly not-forgotten youth. To the contrary, in some ways they are an evocation of the quintessential school days, the bittersweet portrait of the artist as a young man. Not coincidentally, the son of the narrator of the story after which the book is named, asks his father, “Hey, Dad, how’d you like a chance to relive your past?”

Not only do the stories fictionalize a past life, they evoke a Brooklyn of times gone by, a Brooklyn fading in memory as the old-timers move to Florida or die, leaving behind the vanished movie theaters and other borough landmarks recreated in Grayson’s book, written by him while he lived thousands of miles away.

Joyce may have been the first writer who dramatized the need to articulate his memories of his home from a vast distance; he is certainly not the last.

“It’s very much so that you have to leave a place to write about it,” agreed Grayson, who cited emotional distance as well as chronological distance as important elements in shaping memories for the translation into fiction. But, he pointed out, leaving does not mean abandoning. Throughout his adult life he has left the borough and returned, living in different neighborhoods for a month or a season at a time.

Which may be one reason why, unlike Joyce, Grayson doesn’t confine himself to the past. One of the stories in his most recent collection centers on a man taking his son to a concert at the Williamsburg hot spot, Northsix. Another is entitled, “Diary of a Brooklyn Cyclones Hot Dog.”

“There are a lot of writers who’ve written about Brooklyn,” mused Grayson during a phone interview that felt, many times, more like a conversation. “It’s different for every person because the borough is such a treasure trove of different experiences.”

Grayson’s Brooklyn was one not only defined by the movie theaters and branch libraries, but by the buses, which he rode, criss-crossing the borough. “I always liked to explore Brooklyn,” he recalled. “I used to collect bus transfers so I would ride every bus line from one end to the other, so I actually did see a lot of Brooklyn.”

Grayson has already written about the tension between the Brooklyn of 30 or 40 years ago and the Brooklyn of today, in the book’s title story, which, he said, “Is really about two Brooklyn’s. The narrator is probably around my age and he lives with his wife and his teenage son from his first marriage.”

While the story is set in Williamsburg, circa 2005, it features recurrent flashbacks to Canarsie in the 1960s, a time when Brooklyn was a borough defined by the middle-class families who had moved from cramped apartments in older buildings into newly built homes somewhat distant from subway lines, such as the one lived in by the Grayson family in Flatlands.

Now, he stressed, the borough is different. There has been a new wave of middle class immigrants, Grayson noted, as well as a massive dose of gentrification. “It’s shedding its destitute art student image,” he remarked, in a reference to a Post article. “It’s not the Brooklyn I grew up in.”

The Outsiders' Book Review from Underground Literary Alliance Reviews HIGHLY IRREGULAR STORIES & AND TO THINK THAT HE KISSED HIM ON LORIMER STREET

The prolific author Jack Saunders reviews Richard Grayson's two Dumbo Books short story collections for the Underground Literary Alliance's Outsider Writers' Book Review:

Richard Grayson: Highly Irregular Stories; And To Think that He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street and Other Stories
Reviewed by: Jack Saunders

Jack Saunders has met Richard Grayson, and Richard has met Jack.


Highly Irregular Stories (2006) and And to Think That He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street and Other Stories (2006), by Richard Grayson. Dumbo Books of Brooklyn, 72 Conselyea St., Brooklyn, NY 11211-2211. dumbobooks@yahoo.com

And to Think That He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street and Other Stories is Richard Grayson’s 10th volume of fiction. Or metafiction. Or autobiography. Or stand-up comedy. Or short form narrative. He’s published two other books. What are they? Nonfiction? Reportage? I always think of Jonathan Winters saying he is in gar-bahj, when I hear re-por-tahj.

I believe you could call the writing avant-garde. It’s out ahead of the pack. The avant-garde is a tradition, like any other. Like commercial fiction, or literary fiction. It’s anti-commercial. Anti-literary. The literary is a set of conventions an iconoclast wants to bust up.

An iconoclast is aware of his place in the scheme of things. He knows the history of what he’s doing. He is aware, or self-aware, and self-awareness leads to irony.

Irony lends itself to short pieces. You don’t want to be long-winded. That’s for novels, a more expansive form, where you can stretch out. In one sense, you could say the avant-garde leads the way. In another, profounder sense, you could say it doesn’t go anywhere, it just is. It is what it is. Take it or leave it. As it is. This makes reviewing a collection of short pieces either very easy or very hard.

What is the author trying to do, and is he succeeding, on his own terms? Larry wrote the other day that he found himself at looking at books in a rummage sale, and found he was reading them to see what bias they had; not to see what the book was about or to read for enjoyment or to get taken up by it.

What happens when we approach books like that? How do we not approach books like that?

Do collections of stories become something in the aggregate they were not, separately, as lone stories, in magazines that pay in copies and go belly up, or self-published chapbooks, issued in editions of hundreds of copies? Are they clever, amusing, cute? Do they hold up? Do we see a design to the works, over time? A pattern? Is a collection of them more impressive, more authentic, does it have a gravitas scattered fragments cannot demonstrate? Are we impressed? Are we surprised? Did we disremember? Do we see things we didn’t see the first time through?

You can buy the books from lulu.com for $12.95 or $16.95. Highly Irregular Stories is a collection of four chapbooks, which are out of print, and rare. A copy of Eating at Arby’s was recently listed online at $350. It’s good to see the stuff back in print. The stories in And to Think That He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street haven’t been collected before. It’s nice to see them in one spot.

What is One Life in the Short Form Narrative Business like? We get a good feel for it, in these two collections, which span three decades.

What is America like? It’s like Richard Grayson says it is, it’s how Richard Grayson sees it. He’s a Jew from Brooklyn, I’m a cracker from Delray Beach. We have different accents, different life-experiences, different expectations, about life. I’m older than he is, and was in the Air Force for eight years. I boxed. I went ten rounds with Bukowski. I fought the Creature from the Black Lagoon underwater, at Wakulla Springs.

Now I just sit around and watch my boot turn blue, from mildew.

But his America rings true, to me, a deep and eclectic literary sensibility in a pop-culture milieu of glitz and flash, the shallow and the hyped, pinball-machine moths, attracted to the light, the noise, the buzz. Love-bugs, smashed on the windscreen. In the throes of their mating ritual. Up around Gainesville on a two-lane blacktop. Harry Crews afraid to leave his writing studio because he might miss something. And Harry Crews ain’t afraid of death or taxes.

A reader said he kept my books on the back of the crapper, and he started every day with a good old country shit and a belly laugh.

That’s a good thing to do with Richard Grayson’s books. Keep them on the back of the crapper and read them every day. They will make you laugh. The stories are short enough you can read one at a sitting.

My theory is that we are attracted to a writer’s voice, and every time we find a writer we like, we buy everything by him or about him we can find, regardless of genre. If he’s any good, he has invented his own genre, conflated one or more genres into a form of his own, which we recognize, because of his distinctive voice.

Bud Powell had small hands. Mary Lou Williams had hands that looked like $10 worth of spareribs in 1937. They’re not going to sound the same. Why should they? If the short pieces have a unity of form, a consistency of vision, a continuity of effort, a tone, an outlook, when do they begin to be less self-contained short pieces and constituent parts of a longer work composed of short pieces, if they do? If they do, was it an accident?

Public taste is fickle. A writing career is a tradeoff and a crapshoot. You can make a fortune writing but not a living. Not even the living you’d make at more mundane tasks. You have to have a sense of humor about it.

A sense of black humor, like the old comics Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, and Shelley Berman. The writers Woody Allen, Richard Brautigan, and Terry Southern. Would you choose writing for a career? You don’t choose it, it chooses you. What if you choose it and it doesn’t choose you?

Can you be funny about that? For 30 years? It’s not as easy as Richard Grayson makes it look.

The stories in the second book are newer and darker than the stories in the first book. Branch libraries are closed, movie houses shut down, neighborhoods gentrified, people moved away, friends died, what was not there, then was new, and ugly, is now shabby, with people hanging on, because they have no choice. There are constants. The stock market rises and falls, real estate goes up, people have careers, careers have an arc, not all careers have the same arc.

Richard Grayson once observed to me that writers advise you to do what they did. If they teach writing, they advise you to teach writing. If they are some other kind of professional, they advise you to be some other kind of professional. He was a lawyer. Journalists advise people to write for newspapers or magazines. Or television. I was a paraprofessional. A technical writer. Not an engineer or a programmer. On a par with a draftsman or a logistician (supply specialist). A white collar job, but not a full-fledged profession.

What is true is you need a job that pays enough so you can live comfortably, and are not so tired by your work that you are too tired to write, after work. And that can mean too tired emotionally. Then you just do your job and write before and after work. Or during work.

Maybe you’ll have a year off now and then, when you win a grant, inherit some money, or, in my case, once, are able to draw 49 weeks of separation pay, unemployment, and extended unemployment benefits, plus social security, or, another time, cash in the retirement you rolled over into an annuity when your last corporate employer laid you off and live on that for a year. Or mortgage the house you inherited when your grandfather died and run up the balance on a line-of-credit home-equity loan.

I’m always curious about how a writer supported himself when he wrote the books, and think that should go in the books. I think a reader has a right to know that.

Did he kiss a Stalinist’s ass in Macy’s window?

I enjoyed reading these books and I think you will too. I think they’re worth going to some trouble to find out about and buy. And tell your friends about.

And tell the author about them, if you liked them.

Blogcritics.org Reviews HIGHLY IRREGULAR STORIES by Richard Grayson

On September 16, 2006, Nancy Gail reviewed Highly Irregular Stories for Blogcritics.org:

Highly Irregular Stories is an anthology of four Richard Grayson chapbooks. Although not for every taste, selections are intriguing enough to keep the reader turning pages until the end.

"Inside Barbara Walters" examines what might have happened if a young girl had not had a flash of inspiration when it came time for show-and-tell in second grade. Having left her stamp collection at home, young Barbara reached into her backpack and grabbed her Curious George book. After that, all she had to do was mention her interest in reading and the day was saved.

"Progress" takes the relationship between a young man and a stranger and brings it full circle. Ricky is prevented from buying the wrong shirt in Bloomingdale's and ends up going home with Eric Cornell. While Eric fixes dinner for the two of them, he suddenly remembers a neighborhood association meeting he must attend. For some reason, he has gotten himself named in charge of the tree parent committee. Ricky is left at Eric's place to fend for himself. When Ricky calls a pharmacy for a sleep aid, a young teenager named Rico delivers it.

"17 Fragments in Search of a Story" is exactly what the title implies. An author talks about himself and the book he is trying to write in 17 parts. While there is a natural flow to the sections, the ending is not one readers are going to forget.

"Eating at Arby's" was the longest selection and the one I liked least. A retired couple moves to Florida (where else?) and discovers life is not quite what they imagined. In a bizarre move, Grayson takes their day-to-day banter and turns it into an irritating form of repetition. It makes the two main characters sound like idiots. However, I found the reference of wanting to take a trip to Columbia amusing.

"The Governor of the State of Depression" looks into the life of a politician and shows the glamour of a life in public office is not always what people think.

Grayson is hardly a typical author. He takes real life issues in society and uses them freely in every story he writes. With the varied selection, readers will find at minimum one thing they like even if they consider the rest to be junk.

Judd Lear Silverman Reviews Richard Grayson's AND TO THINK THAT HE KISSED HIM ON LORIMER STREET

On his eponymous blog, Judd Lear Silverman reviewed Richard Grayson's And to Think That He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street on September 9, 2006:

If you're not familiar with the writer, Richard Grayson, you should be, especially those who love the short story form. Besides spending time on bogus runs for political office and publicity stunts that have graced People and Page Six in the Post, Grayson's been writing prolifically for years, and his first anthology, With Hitler in New York, was recently reissued. Other humorous writings have included the collections I Break for Delmore Schwartz, Eating at Arby's: The South Florida Stories, and Narcissism and Me, as well as a novella, The Silicon Valley Diet. [Some of these stories have also been reprinted in Highly Irregular Stories (Dumbo Books).] But his recent collection, entitled And to Think That He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street, is perhaps the best collection to start with, reflecting not only his gifts as a satirist but his ability to keep the mind so busy it doesn't know that the heart has been touched. Like a reality TV junkie, Grayson mixes seeming fact with fiction, borrowing names, places and people from his own life and shaping them into odd and effecting commentaries on the passage of time, family relationships, sexuality, race relations, and America's pathological preoccupation with celebrity. Some stories are quick brushstroke sketches of people and a particular time. Others are journeys told in vignettes stretching spans of 20-30 years. Friendships are explored in sideways glances, showing how the most unlikely of alliances can turn into lifelong relationships. Numerous stories (perhaps one too many for the same collection) are subdivided by real estate locations: old movie palaces, libraries, and shopping centers, where seemingly innocuous events are recalled that by the end of the story add up to a whole lifetime of experience. Grayson shape shifts from gay to straight, white to black, male to female, kid to aging wit. Grandparents and childhood buddies play recurrent and important roles, but discerning fact from fiction in Grayson's work is tricky until one considers these stories in the aggregate. In the biography of the great Italian filmmaker, Federico Fellini, the maestro is quoted as saying that the truth of his life is not in the facts reported by birth certificates, death notices and journalistic reportage, but in his art, his dreams, his films--it is in the revelation of the imagination that the real artist is known. Likewise, the truth of Grayson is in these tales, invented and reinvented versions of his life and experience. The facts may not be verifiable, but the affection and care he displays in his description of life's travels and the people in his life are real, resulting in stories that are affecting and sharply observed. Recommended.

Bookgasm Reviews HIGHLY IRREGULAR STORIES by Richard Grayson

Ken Davis has reviewed Highly Irregular Stories at Bookgasm:

With HIGHLY IRREGULAR STORIES, I can’t think of adjectives that more accurately describe this collection of Richard Grayson’s writings than the first two of his title, although unorthodox, quirky, peculiar and highly entertaining also come to mind.

This book is purportedly an accumulation of stories originally published in the 1970s and ’80s in four separate chapbooks (DISJOINTED FICTIONS, EATING AT ARBY’S, THE GREATEST SHORT STORY THAT ABSOLUTELY EVER WAS and NARCISSISM AND ME), all long been out of print. I wouldn’t exactly describe the contents as stories, at least in the traditional sense anyway. Many of them might be better described as vignettes or sometimes as just snippets of a fictional conversation. Heck, “Some Sad News” is a mere 180 words. By comparison, this review is roughly 450. I didn’t find any exquisite plots or character development, but I was too busy enjoying myself to care.

Grayson is a literary performance artist. His words are avant-garde and so uniquely different than anything else I’ve ever read., as the book is chock full of the offbeat. Take the narrator in the 147-word “Ordinary Peepholes,” who spies the scrawled message on a subway “FOR A GOOD LAY CALL 969-9970.” He recognizes the phone number as his sister’s and the handwriting as his father’s. Or how about the very subtle but delicious irony in “I Saw Mommy Kissing Citicorp,” in which the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board who oversees the ebb and flow of cash in this nation has trouble with an ATM and can’t withdraw $200.

The entries from EATING AT ARBY’S were by far the most entertaining, written in the style of the old Dick and Jane readers, but updated to feature the liberal thinkers Manny and Zelda. These two don’t discuss how fast Spot can run, opting instead for more adult subject matter. For example, in “Strange Experience,” Zelda comes home and announces, “Look what I have got, Manny. I have some cocaine.” Manny replies, “So that white powder is cocaine. I have heard a lot about it from many people.”

Manny and Zelda are taken to a gun range by their friend José in “Fun with a Gun.” Zelda warms to the idea of firearms and says, “Manny, I want to shoot that gun. That gun will become our friend, just like José is our friend.” The topics of murder, homosexuality and outrageous electric bills also are tackled by the pair. Sasson Jeans and the Arby’s salad bar at Arby’s also make hilarious repeat appearances.

I highly recommend this book and reading in general. So do Manny and Zelda. In “Shopping in the Mall,” Zelda says, “I read a book once. It made me think.” Manny replies “Thinking is fun. I like to think.” – Ken Davis

Kirkus Discoveries Reviews HIGHLY IRREGULAR STORIES by Richard Grayson

Kirkus Discoveries reviewed Highly Irregular Stories by Richard Grayson on July 14:



HIGHLY IRREGULAR STORIES
Author: Grayson, Richard

Review Date: JULY 14, 2006
Publisher:Dumbo Books (178 pp.)
Price (paperback): $12.95
Publication Date: 2006
ISBN (paperback): 1-4116-5796-9
Category: AUTHORS
Classification: FICTION

An audacious and wickedly smart comedic writer brings his full weight to bear in a collection of his early work.

Grayson, no stranger to experimentation, here assembles four of his most engaging chapbooks, which merge nicely as an eclectic anthology of intriguing short stories. The author, who breaks nearly every literary rule in an obsessive effort to be unique, is both maddeningly and hilariously self-aware. “Narcissism and Me” leaps dizzyingly between the author’s presence and the actual story like a snake eating its tail, while “Sixteen Attempts to Justify My Existence” reads like a blog from another planet, and “I Saw Mommy Kissing Citicorp” waxes poetic on the rise and fall of 1980s greed. No business is safe, either, as Grayson mocks traditional publishing’s buzzed-based marketing with caustic sarcasm in “The Greatest Short Story That Absolutely Ever Was.” In “The Facts Are Always Friendly,” the action is narrated through a series of terse, date-stamped factual statements. Grayson opens up in the meatier “Eating at Arby’s,” a clever spoof written in childlike prose. It details the absurd dichotomies of South Florida as a pair of retirees fall prey to consumerism, political exiles and even gunplay on their way to the mall. With a keen eye for highlighting the high anxieties of the modern world, and many of the sensibilities of a sensitive urban writer, Grayson is occasionally compared to Woody Allen. But Grayson’s stories here recall no one so much as Richard Brautigan, who walked a similar line between wit and warmth in his more eccentric novels. Though certainly unconventional, Highly Irregular Stories are refreshing because of their aloofness, which allows the author to indulge his peculiar point of view.

An iconoclast sways to his own beat, making beautiful music along the way.

QueerType on Richard Grayson's WITH HITLER IN NEW YORK

Jameson Currier writes about "With Hitler in New York" at his blog QueerType on July 2, 2006:

Three Discoveries: During the spring, works by three writers came to my attention that I can highly recommend, one is Richard Grayson's surreal and thought-provoking short story, "With Hitler in New York," which was also the title of a collection of his short stories that were published in the late 1970s and which has been recently reissued. In the story, Hitler becomes a stand-in for the alienation and discrimination many Germans felt in the decades after the war. The story is readable on-line via a link on Grayson's Web Site. (http://www.richardgrayson.com/) Grayson also has an impressive political background (in the 1980s he was a Presidential candidate), but it is his short fiction that intrigues me most. His other collections worth exploring are Let Slip the Dogs of War, Lincoln's Doctor's Dog and Other Stories, and his most recent collection, And to Think He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street.

Literary Kicks reviews Richard Grayson's AND TO THINK THAT HE KISSED HIM ON LORIMER STREET

Levi Asher reviewed Richard Grayson's And To Think That He Kissed Him On Lorimer Street at his blog Literary Kicks (LitKicks) on June 29, 2006:

Richard Grayson's And To Think That He Kissed Him On Lorimer Street allows the touching moments to sneak up on the reader. This is a surprising collection of assorted writings by a veteran Brooklyn author who once published a diary of a New York City congressional campaign and has produced numerous other books with intriguing titles like The Boy Who Fell To Brooklyn and I Brake For Delmore Schwartz (a long list of the author's books can be found here). I really like the first story in this collection, in which a good-humored narrator chaperones his teenage son to a loud punk concert at the Northsix club in Brooklyn. His son is openly gay, and the title of the book is explained when the trio amass at the L Train subway entrance on Lorimer Street and the father averts his eyes, wondering at his own amazing tolerance, while the two boys kiss goodnight. Elsewhere, Grayson's book gives us a tour of Brooklyn neighborhoods, a list of bad sitcoms nobody else remembers, and many other scattered ideas. The book has more sprawl than focus, but then so does the borough it proudly represents.

Kaye Trout Book Reviews reviews HIGHLY IRREGULAR STORIES by Richard Grayson

Kaye Trout's Book Reviews has reviewed Highly Irregular Stories by Richard Grayson:

Wednesday, June 21, 2006
HIGHLY IRREGULAR STORIES by Richard Grayson

Dumbo Books of Brooklyn
72 Conselyea Street, Brooklyn, NY 11211
http://dumbobooksofbrooklyn.blogspot.com
www.richardgrayson.com
Genre: Fiction/Humor
Rating: Unusual
ISBN: 1411657969, $12.95, 177 pp, 2006

Highly Irregular Stories is, indeed, a most appropriate title for this compilation of prior writings: Disjointed Fictions, Eating at Arby’s, The Greatest Short Story That Absolutely Ever Was and Narcissism and Me.

Richard Grayson opens with: "The anarchist’s bomb that killed Czar Alexander II in St. Petersburg in 1881 led to the Russian pogroms and the anti-Semite May Laws of 1882. To these events we Americans owe countless things: the comedy of Woody Allen and Lenny Bruce; the popularity of psychoanalysis . . ."

It’s interesting that Woody Allen and psychoanalysis are first among his list and that’s just what I was feeling as I read this book. Grayson has taken that Woody Allen-type New York humor about a self-deprecating, neurotic, talented man one step further into the twilight zone.

As I’m not a New Yorker and never could fully appreciate Woody Allen’s humor, I’ll let the book stand on its own. My experience of reading Eating at Arby’s about Manny and Zelda in downtown Miami brought back memories of learning to read with Dick and Jane. It almost has the same rhythm and meaningful depth. We were just missing "See Spot run."

But to be fair, I would like to quote from "Myself Redux" which I particularly enjoyed: one, for the historical perspective and two, for the Kurt Vonnegut-flavor of humor:

""On Wednesday, the thirteenth day of October in the year many people call 49 B.C., Caius Julius Caesar, a Roman general, crossed the ancient watery boundary between Cisaplin Gaul and Italy known as the River Rubicon, thus making immortal the phrase "to cross the Rubicon," meaning "to take a decisive and irrevocable step."

Precisely two millennia later, on Wednesday, the thirteenth of October in the Christian year 1951, my Jewish parents took a decisive and irrevocable step in a room of the Quality Courts Motel outside Corning, New York. Within a week, the embryo that was to become the person writing these words was as large as one of Caius Julius Caesar’s fingernails. A tube formed within the embryo. This enlarged at a certain point, and then it began to pulsate. Eventually this pulsating tube developed into a four-chambered organ which circulated the fluid known as blood throughout my body.

On Sunday, October 17, 1971, 185 years and one day after the establishment of the United States Bureau of the Mint, I decided that my four-chambered pulsating organ had been broken because I had found the 18-year-old female whom I described as my "girlfriend" in bed with my 16-year-old brother, their four-chambered organs pulsating rapidly.

One week later, on the twenty-sixth anniversary of the establishment of the United Nations, I attempted to stop the pulsating of my four-chambered organ by making a three centimeter incision with a razor blade across my left wrist.

The following Monday, October 25, 1971, known that year as "Veterans Day" due to federal legislation enacted to give citizens a three-day holiday weekend, I found myself in the offices of the clinical psychologist Marilyn Wertheim, crying into a tissue.""

The story goes on to tell us: his girlfriend becomes pregnant, his brother is killed when hit by a bus, he marries his girlfriend, she has the baby, he doesn’t know whether he’s a father or an uncle, the baby dies, and they annul the marriage. There’s more but that will give you an idea of the beginning.

So, if you’re a Woody Allen fan and using the same stuff as Richard, you just might enjoy this book and a trip into the twilight zone.

Richard Grayson is a prolific writer and to appreciate who he is, what he has accomplished and what he has written, I refer you to his website: www.richardgrayson.com.

Reviewed by Kaye Trout - June 21, 2006 - Copyright

Wet Asphalt reviews Richard Grayson's AND TO THINK THAT HE KISSED HIM ON LORIMER STREET

Eric Rosenfeld reviewed Richard Grayson's And to Think That He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street at his blog Wet Asphalt on June 21, 2006:

Richard Grayson's new book And to Think That He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street is a collection of confessional fiction that I think illustrates both the best and the worst of how the style can be used. Much of Lorimer Street is clearly autobiographical—Grayson even uses his own name—and reads more like memoir than fiction, though at least once he plays around with this by making himself married to a woman and with children, while in the other stories he's an unmarried, aging homosexual. Grayson generally organizes these stories around themes and objects—e.g. libraries he used to go to or the dead silent film star who once lived in his house. In the story "Conselyea Street" he employs this trick to devastating effect as he tears off pieces of life in New York until the only thing left is real estate. By way of contrast there is "The Cool Guy," in which Grayson rambles on interminably about some guy he used to know, and how this guy dated this girl and then this other girl and then he (Grayson) dated this girl and now she's married and has kids and... wait, why am I reading this again? "The Cool Guy" feels like something Grayson copied right out of his diary.

There are other stories that (though still confessional) are more clearly fictional, and those are the high-points of the collection. Richard Grayson has been around for a long time and his practiced simplicity is easy to read; his prose manages to be lean without being terse. Among these more fictional stories is a tale about a foreign girl who is one of the hot dog mascots for the Coney Island Cyclones baseball team. Another is about a kid in college whose Muslim roommate has a therapy monkey. A third is about a guy whose pushy female friend gets off on watching the protagonist kiss her boyfriend. These are all fun to read and a story collection made up entirely of stories like these would deserve glowing praise. As it stands parts of this book make clear that Richard Grayson is very good at writing fiction, while other parts make you wish he would actually write some.

The question then isn't "can Richard Grayson write," it's why is he typing out these boring autobiographical numbers?...

Grayson...refers to "...the small press that published... my book of idiotic stories." Which might be funny if he didn't sound serious, and this wasn't a book of "idiotic" stories published by a small press. Grayson's work paints a portrait of a talented writer whose ambition has washed away in a sea of middling reviews and self-pity. This is a man who has given up, and I'm not talking about going to law school, I can understand resigning yourself to not making a living as a writer when so few do. It's like he's given up on being read, he's given up on literature, and he's given up on mattering. And frankly if he thinks so poorly of his own work then why is he inflicting it on other people at all? Why bother?

What happened to you, Richard?

Whatever happened, I think it's the real reason for the uneven quality of the stories in this collection. This is the work of a good writer who doesn't think what he does matters anymore. And that's kind of sad and unfortunate. Richard, come back.

How Dumbo Books Makes Money: Product Placement in AND TO THINK THAT HE KISSED HIM ON LORIMER STREET

This post appeared on Richard Grayson's MySpace blog on June 13, 2006:

Product Placement in AND TO THINK THAT HE KISSED HIM ON LORIMER STREET


Apparently The New York Times ("Product Placement Deals Make Leap From Film to Books" by Motoko Rich)thinks it's newsworthy that authors using their books of fiction for product placement deals.

But I've been doing that for years. Because few people actually buy my books, I have to make money by mentioning products, services, and corporations which pay me to plug them.

For example, in "Schmuck Brothers of East Harlem" -- just one of the thirty stories in And to Think That He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street, I got money for plugging Murray's Sturgeon Shop, Washington Mutual Bank, the Leonard Nimoy Theatre,

the Kashbah Kosher Café, Victoria's Secret, Tasti D-Lite, the Estée Lauder Stress Relief Eye Mask, Starbucks frappuccinos, Hard Candy Vintage Nail Polish's classic Tantrum, Urban Decay's Maui Wowie eyeshadow, the Café des Artistes, the Cellcomet Anti-Stress Cream Mask, Cooper 35 Restaurant, Molson Ale, Blue Cult jeans, Kim's Video, Diary of a Mad Black Woman, The Dreamers, Con Edison, Target, Jewelrymaven.com, Mitchum Deodorant, Demeter's Riding Crop fragrance, Altoids, SparkNotes, Kiehl's Pharmacy, the Union Square Café, The Body Shop, Sephora, Longo's Baci XXX lip gloss and even the St. Marks Bookshop, which doesn't carry the book.

Syntax of Things reviews Richard Grayson's AND TO THINK THAT HE KISSED HIM ON LORIMER STREET

Jeff Bryant reviewed Richard Grayson's And to Think That He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street at his blog Syntax of Things on June 5, 2006. Excerpts:

And To Think That He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street
by Richard Grayson
Dumbo Books
Short Stories; 289 pp.

A few months ago I got an email from Richard Grayson asking if I would be interested in reading his new collection. He warned me that it would be a waste of my time and that the book might make for a better doorstop than reading material. Well, if a book has the potential to keep the cool breeze flowing through my room, I can't turn it down, probably would even read it before putting it to use. And I did. Read it. And man did I enjoy it. Grayson is nothing short of a master storyteller, a man willing to take chances, to mix the straightforward narrative with avant-garde twists. Letters to the editor, mysterious front-page ads in the New York Times, a very young Anderson Cooper, and references to YouTube and Myspace, all make for an interesting collage, a blend of nostalgia with the very contemporary. . .

Highlights for me include the numerous recollections of the evolutions of theaters in Brooklyn and Broward County, the hilarious tale of a man forced to go to a lesser college by his zealous father and who ends up rooming with a monkey which he plots to kill after the monkey pees on his stuff, and the first line from the story "G--d Is My Fuckbuddy": "Significant others come and go but fuckbuddies can be forever." One can only speculate as to why a publisher didn't give this collection a shot, but luckily for us, Grayson did all the work himself. He's even made the book available as a free download, but save your eyes and give the man a few bucks. You'll be glad you did.

*****

That Girl Who Writes Stuff on Richard Grayson's HIGHLY IRREGULAR STORIES

This post is from Richard Grayson's MySpace blog for June 6, 2006:

That Girl Who Writes Stuff has blogged about Highly Irregular Stories:

Highly Irregular Stories by Richard Grayson
Aside from finding dirty bits on the internet to flash at you, I spent part of my weekend sunning myself like a walrus and reading Richard Grayson’s Highly Irregular Stories.

The book is a compilation of four out-of-print chapbooks (Disjointed Fictions, Eating at Arby’s: The South Florida Stories [my favorite], The Greatest Short Story That Absolutely Ever Was, and Narcissism and Me).

If you are unfamiliar with the bizarre tales of Mr. Grayson I have much to share with you.

He’s odd.

A very odd man indeed.

And funny, funny, funny.

I could describe his stories’ weirdness to you but that’d be like talking through a bucket of water.

You really need to be submerged in it too to get the full effect.

But if you insist . . .

Here are few of the sections I highlighted and smiley-faced in my copy.

I’m a geek, I know.

Just let it be.

I also realize that only showing you nuggets from his stories is a little like showing you a box with a severed finger in it and running off giggling. . . . you need some context.

That’s fine.

I understand that.

And for some reason still don’t care.

So, enjoy the severed nuggets:

From Disjointed Fictions:

Ordinary Peepholes:

My eye catches an unauthorized advertisement scrawled on the subway map across from my seat:

FOR A GOOD LAY CALL 969-9970

It’s bad enough that this is my sister’s phone number, but what really hurts is that the handwriting is unmistakably my father’s. (p. 7)

Escape from the Planet of Humans:

She is tall, slightly chubby, with frizzy long brown hair and a scar on her nose. She wears a flannel shirt over a turtleneck, faded jeans, work boots, hoop earrings and a red kerchief. She reminds me of something else.

Our eyes meet once. Neither of us really smiles.

I look down at her application to graduate school and mentally note her name and address. I hand another man two dollars and receive some coins back in return. Then I go home and I write this letter:

Dear Rebecca Archer:
You don’t know me but I stood next to you today at the copy center. You are the most beautiful lesbian I have ever seen. Good luck with your grad school applications.
Sincerely yours,
(My name)

Guess what happens next (p.41)

Eating at Arby’s: The South Florida Stories:

I’m not even going to show you a passage. Just know that the funniest two characters you are ever going to meet play here.


From Narcissism and Me:

Some Arbitrary Answers:

I ask my mother what kind of birth control she uses.
“Headaches, she says. . . . .

I ask my brother’s girlfriend’s father’s grandmother’s doctor’s dentist’s mother’s therapist’s rabbi what life is all about.

“Headaches,” the rabbi says. (156-7)

That Girl Who Writes Stuff reviews HIGHLY IRREGULAR STORIES by Richard Grayson

That Girl Who Writes Stuff has blogged about Highly Irregular Stories:

Highly Irregular Stories by Richard Grayson

Aside from finding dirty bits on the internet to flash at you, I spent part of my weekend sunning myself like a walrus and reading Richard Grayson’s Highly Irregular Stories.

The book is a compilation of four out-of-print chapbooks (Disjointed Fictions, Eating at Arby’s: The South Florida Stories (my favorite), The Greatest Short Story That Absolutely Ever Was, and Narcissism and Me.

If you are unfamiliar with the bizarre tales of Mr. Grayson I have much to share with you.

He’s odd.

A very odd man indeed.

And funny, funny, funny.

I could describe his stories’ weirdness to you but that’d be like talking through a bucket of water.

You really need to be submerged in it too to get the full effect.

But if you insist . . .

Here are few of the sections I highlighted and smiley-faced in my copy.

I’m a geek, I know.

Just let it be.

I also realize that only showing you nuggets from his stories is a little like showing you a box with a severed finger in it and running off giggling. . . . you need some context.

That’s fine.

I understand that.

And for some reason still don’t care.

So, enjoy the severed nuggets:

From Disjointed Fictions:

Ordinary Peepholes:

My eye catches an unauthorized advertisement scrawled on the subway map across from my seat:

FOR A GOOD LAY CALL 969-9970

It’s bad enough that this is my sister’s phone number, but what really hurts is that the handwriting is unmistakably my father’s. (p. 7)


Escape from the Planet of Humans:

She is tall, slightly chubby, with frizzy long brown hair and a scar on her nose. She wears a flannel shirt over a turtleneck, faded jeans, work boots, hoop earrings and a red kerchief. She reminds me of something else.

Our eyes meet once. Neither of us really smiles.

I look down at her application to graduate school and mentally note her name and address. I hand another man two dollars and receive some coins back in return. Then I go home and I write this letter:

Dear Rebecca Archer:
You don’t know me but I stood next to you today at the copy center. You are the most beautiful lesbian I have ever seen. Good luck with your grad school applications.
Sincerely yours,
(My name)

Guess what happens next (p.41)


Eating at Arby’s: The South Florida Stories:

I’m not even going to show you a passage. Just know that the funniest two characters you are ever going to meet play here.


From Narcissism and Me:

Some Arbitrary Answers:

I ask my mother what kind of birth control she uses.
“Headaches, she says. . . . .

I ask my brother’s girlfriend’s father’s grandmother’s doctor’s dentist’s mother’s therapist’s rabbi what life is all about.

“Headaches,” the rabbi says. (156 -7)

Get your copy here

Pete Lit reviews Richard Grayson's AND TO THINK THAT HE KISSED HIM ON LORIMER STREET

Pete Anderson reviewed Richard Grayson's AND TO THINK THAT HE KISSED HIM ON LORIMER STREET at his blog Pete Lit on May 31, 2006. Excerpts:

And To Think That He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street is a fine collection of stories from the prolific Richard Grayson. Grayson tells these twenty-nine stories exclusively from a first-person perspective, making them come off as at least partially autobiographical. The back cover copy admits as much, calling the book "part fictional memoir, part memorish fiction," and I've read just enough about Grayson's personal life to know that many of the narratives mirror his own life. This is a bit of a bold move in the post-Frey literary world, where questions over what is fact and what is fiction often distract the reader from the writer's main point--the telling of the story itself. Personally, I don't particularly care how much of these narratives came directly from Grayson's life, and how much he invented. The important thing is that the stories are compellingly readable; Grayson is a natural storyteller, tireless and inventive, and the Lorimer Street stories are of course him telling of his own life but, more importantly, of the world around him.

For me, three stories from the collection stand out. "Conselyea Street" tells of a middle-aged contractor who has lived his entire life in one Brooklyn brownstone, with several generations of his family living there during his youth. The brownstone--owned by his family for decades--is located in what has become a very trendy neighborhood, and the narrator faces the dilemma of choosing, for a tenant, between his young niece and his nearly-as-young lover (the latter, he suspects, is only interested in him for the apartment). He soberly faces a critical decision between keeping family tradition and satisfying fleetingly sensual needs.

"Bottom, New York Times, Front Page, Tiny Print" is a quietly heartbreaking story of a young man who has abandoned his family, which desperately tries contacting him via classified ads in the New York Times. As time goes on, their ads run less and less frequently as they slowly abandon hope of finding him again, and adjust to no longer having him in their lives.

Perhaps the strongest story, "The Lost Movie Theaters of Southeastern Brooklyn and Rockaway Beach," is told through Grayson's recurring device of a lengthy list of places and people from his life, with added commentary. In this story, he catalogs an extensive list of defunct movie theaters, each with its own distinct section and headings, mentioning where they were located, what movies he saw there and whom he saw them with, what became of the theater buildings and, indirectly, what each theater meant to his life. In one particularly poignant scene, he tries to convince his grandmother, implausibly, to see Boyz N the Hood with him:

"Richard," she said, "my movie-going days are over." Then she wanted to know why I didn't just go two doors down from the theater and bring back a movie from the video store.

"It's not the same thing," I said. I saw Boys N the Hood alone.

The Surfside closed three years later, a few months after my grandmother died.

Driving by on Rockaway Beach Boulevard last summer, I couldn't tell it had once been a movie theater.

This unexpected generational twist--his grandmother wanting to rent a movie, while he longs for the old-fashioned theater experience--was quite a nice touch. And the book is filled with similarly nice touches like this one. A very satisfying effort overall.

Sunday Evening in Park Slope: Richard Grayson Reading from AND TO THINK THAT HE KISSED HIM ON LORIMER STREET at Barbès on May 21

Richard Grayson will be reading from his short story collection And to Think That He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street at Barbès at 6 p.m. on Sunday, May 21, 2006.

Kirkus Discoveries reviews Richard Grayson's AND TO THINK THAT HE KISSED HIM ON LORIMER STREET

Kirkus Discoveries has reviewed Richard Grayson's And to Think That He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street:

AND TO THINK THAT HE KISSED HIM ON LORIMER STREET
and Other Stories

Author: Grayson, Richard

Review Date: APRIL 13, 2006
Publisher:Dumbo Books (304 pp.)
Price (paperback): $16.95
Publication Date: 2006
ISBN (paperback): 1-4116-7595-9
Category: AUTHORS
Classification: FICTION

The dynamic Brooklyn cityscape serves as the backdrop in this beguiling collection of short stories.

Grayson’s tenth volume of fiction introduces a multicultural multitude of characters, including a teen lesbian from Uzbekistan who works as a Brooklyn Cyclones hot-dog mascot and a gay black student whose Pakistani roommate’s pet monkey helps him find acceptance on a mildly homophobic campus. Most, though, are slight variations on the quasi-autobiographical persona of a middle-aged white man reminiscing about the friends, families, lovers and locales that have populated his life. Grayson often constructs his loose, episodic narratives with a pop-culture scaffolding, as in “Seven Sitcoms,” in which the narrator meditates on his relationship with his family’s black housekeeper through a commentary on the racial and class stereotypes of early TV sitcoms; and “1001 Ways to Defeat Green Arrow,” a reconstruction of a love affair between a man and his much younger stepbrother, paired with a hilarious exegesis of a comic-book hero in decline. In other stories, like “Branch Libraries of Southeastern Brooklyn” and “The Lost Movie Theaters of Southeastern Brooklyn and Rockaway Beach,” the author maps out memories against the geography of his beloved Brooklyn, with excursions to Los Angeles and South Florida. Grayson’s low-key, conversational prose is injected with flashes of wry wit (“I live in a neighborhood where neighbors notice my lack of body art”), but some of the slighter pieces are no more than droll shaggy-dog stories. The more substantial ones, however, like “Conselyea Street,” about a gay man with a younger Japanese lover reflecting on his Williamsburg neighborhood’s demographic transitions—from Italian to Hispanic to hipster to yuppie—fuse vivid characters with a keen sense of place and cultural specificity.

A funny, odd, somehow familiar and fully convincing fictional world.

"Bending Gender": Richard Grayson reviews Jonathan Ames’s "Sexual Metamorphosis: An Anthology of Transsexual Memoirs" in American Book Review

Richard Grayson reviews Sexual Metamorphosis: An Anthology of Transsexual Memoirs, edited by Jonathan Ames, in the January/February 2006 issue of American Book Review:

Sexual Metamorphosis: An Anthology of Transsexual Memoirs
Edited and with an introduction by Jonathan Ames
Vintage Books, paper, $13.95, 314 pages

By Richard Grayson

Most Americans are intrigued by transsexuals but don’t know what to make of them. I can recall the dopey reaction of one teenager to the sentimental 1970 film The Christine Jorgensen Story: “She was such a cute guy! Why did she become a girl?”

Sexual Metamorphosis: An Anthology of Transsexual Memoirs, doesn’t answer my adolescent question. Jonathan Ames, the book’s editor, is after something more profound than that. In his introduction, Ames calls the etiology of gender dysphoria “probably unanswerable…a mystery of the human condition.” (xv) The testimony of the fifteen transsexuals compiled here serves as a celebration of that mystery and of the infinity capacity of human beings to reinvent themselves.

At first blush, Ames – a talented novelist, performance artist, and newspaper columnist and perhaps the wittiest writer of his generation – might seem an odd guiding force behind this kind of anthology. But Ames’s comic novels – I Pass Like the Night, The Extra Man, and Wake Up, Sir! – are, at their heart, stories of quirky characters choosing to profoundly transform their lives.

While changing one’s sex may seem like a drastic step, the overarching theme of the entries in Sexual Metamorphosis is restoring the natural order of things. The first excerpt, Case 129 from Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, sets the tone for the volume. A nineteenth-century Hungarian physician describes how, despite marriage and children, he has felt “like a woman in a man’s form” his entire life.

Although the second memoirist, the Danish painter Lili Elbe, born Einar Wegener, died in the 1930s following surgical implantation of ovaries, later medical advances made true sex change possible and fairly safe. At this point, Ames notes, transsexuals’ memoirs take on the same basic narrative structure: First, a child feels terribly uncomfortable in his or her gender role; next, an adolescent or adult, after much torment, undergoes a transformation into his or her “true” sex; finally, after more suffering – now physical as well as psychological – the individual finds peace, if not total happiness, in the aftermath of the sex change.

The excerpts from Jan Morris’s Conundrum – the book that made transsexuals respectable if still a bit outré – exhibit all the stylistic gifts of her best travel writing. Morris’s earliest memory, exquisitely rendered, is of three-year-old James, sitting beneath his mother’s piano as she plays Sibelius, suddenly realizing that he “had been born in the wrong body, and should really be a girl.”

Despite that, Morris relates a happy, nearly idyllic childhood, and seems so well-adjusted that it makes James’s transformation from husband and father into plucky, Mrs. Miniver-like Jan almost anticlimactic.

Some of these selections deal with public reaction to the writer’s metamorphosis. Jorgensen, the former Army private from the Bronx whose Danish sex change operation in 1952 caused a national sensation, is represented here with an account that goes a long way to explain how her unpretentious charm and ladylike demeanor made her something of a beloved figure, the first celebrity transsexual.

In contrast, Christine Cossey, a fashion model and James Bond girl cruelly outed by British tabloids, wanted to keep her gender reassignment a secret, not only to the general public but also to her overbearing mother-in-law. When, to her horror, Cossey’s sex change is revealed, her career and fairy-tale marriage appear to come apart.

Most of these memoirs deal not with public coming out, but with private people struggling with their own feelings and relationships. The excerpt from Deirde McCloskey’s Crossing relates how a distinguished economics professor named Donald, who has long enjoyed dressing as a woman, finally decides to become Deirdre.

McCloskey concentrates on the struggles with Donald’s wife and adult children, who react to his crossing the gender barrier with horror and cruelty. No wonder McCloskey tells her story in the third person.

On the other hand, the excerpt from tennis player and physician Renée Richards’s Second Serve concentrates on the physical aspects of the metamorphosis, recounting in somewhat gruesome detail the bodily pain and suffering she undergoes in her surgical transformation from Richard Raskin, as well as the practical clinical details of maintaining her new sex organs.

A recurring motif is that both rejection and acceptance can come unexpectedly. Donna Rose and Deirdre McCloskey tell of wives who ridicule and demean their husbands’ desires and take extreme measures to avoid them post-surgery and post-divorce. However, the wife of Jennifer Finney Boylan, a novelist and English professor, stays in the relationship after her husband has become a woman.

Generally, transsexuals’ parents and grandparents, even those from the working class, rally around them surprisingly quickly, perhaps because they’ve known something was up since childhood. Children have more trouble getting used to their parents’ transformations, though the younger they are, the more they take the sex change in stride. The funniest moment in the book is when, on his first outing with his newly-female father, Donna Rose’s son Matt, wanting to get her attention in a crowded store, shouts out, “Hey, Dad!” – and immediately covers his mouth as if trying to recapture the words.

As Ames points out, the public is particularly ignorant of female-to-male transsexuals (F-to-M’s). However, the excerpts of the memoirs of Mario Martino, Loren Cameron, and Mark Rees – as well as the account of “Joe” from a book written by Dr. Harry Benjamin, who coined the term transsexual and whose Benjamin Standards are guiding principles that still form the basis for treatment today – show that their struggles are quite similar to their M-to-F counterparts.

One point the anthology makes crystal clear is that sex and gender, sexual orientation and sexual identity, are distinct categories. About the only thing gay and lesbian people have in common with transsexuals, Boylan tells her psychologist, is that the same people beat up both groups.

Uncharacteristically, Jonathan Ames stays in the background too much here. Beyond his thoughtful introduction to the volume, he gives us only a few sentences setting up each entry. A reader unfamiliar with the tragic story of the homophobic murder of Army Sgt. Donald Watkins may be somewhat confused reading the moving excerpts from the memoir of Calpernia Sarah Addams, Watkins’s transsexual beauty-queen girlfriend.

All of the memoirists here are white Americans or western Europeans, leaving readers to wonder how cultural differences might affect transsexuals in other parts of the world. Unfortunately, few Asian transsexuals – the best known are the Beijing Modern Dance Company's artistic director Jin Xing and the Thai boxer-turned-actress Parinya Charoenphol – have written memoirs available in English translation, and as Ames points out, no anthology can be a perfect selection.

However, given their prominence in the transsexual community, the apparent omission of African-Americans is unfortunate. Did Ames deliberately pass on the recent autobiography Hiding My Candy by The Lady Chablis of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil fame? Perhaps he felt that her decision to keep her penis – the “candy” of her book’s title – made her different from his other memoirists.

The Lady Chablis may actually be closer in spirit to today’s new trans generation, educated in gender deconstruction and not so interested in becoming a “real” man or women. Forgoing the surgery or even hormone treatments that make the transformation definitive for the writers in Sexual Metamorphosis, young genderqueers can be perfectly comfortable having both breasts and a penis. Loren Cameron, a San Francisco F-to-M photographer, notes in his memoir that younger people have less static gender identification than his generation of transsexuals. Ames, acutely attuned to the cultural scene, is aware of the changes in transsexual culture, but the production of memoirs by the coming generation will have to wait.

Although Ames’s anthology should find a place on the syllabi of college courses in human sexuality, its compelling narratives make Sexual Metamorphosis a work of literature.