This week Supersition Mountain Press published Richard Grayson's A Year in Rockaway. It is available in a 192-page trade paperback edition for $12.99, as well as an Amazon Kindle edition published by Art Pants Company for 99 cents.
The promo stuff says in part,
Richard Grayson, author of such acclaimed short story collections as WITH HITLER IN NEW YORK, LINCOLN'S DOCTOR'S DOG, I SURVIVED CARACAS TRAFFIC, THE SILICON VALLEY DIET and I BRAKE FOR DELMORE SCHWARTZ, has kept a daily diary for over 41 years, since the summer of 1969, when he was an agoraphobic Brooklyn teenager.
A YEAR IN ROCKAWAY is the sixth and final volume of THE BROOKLYN DIARIES, which takes his own story from a recently-housebound 18-year-old tentatively about to begin Brooklyn College to achieving his dream of being a published author and discovering it's not all that he expected (or maybe it is).
Previous volumes in the series were SUMMER IN BROOKLYN (1969-1975), WINTER IN BROOKLYN (December 1971-March 1972), SPRING IN BROOKLYN (March-April 1975), AUTUMN IN BROOKLYN (September-November 1978), and MORE SUMMER IN BROOKLYN (1976-1979).
The year in Rockaway starts in 1980, when Grayson is in his first apartment, a beachfront studio whose $240 rent he struggles to pay. His first book, WITH HITLER IN NEW YORK, published the year before, received some wonderful reviews but has earned him no more money than his scores of published stories in literary magazines ever did.
Nor has book publication gotten him the full-time job as a creative writing professor that he once coveted. Facing illness, terminal diagnoses for two of his four beloved grandparents, his own immediate family distant in Florida or dangerously involved with gangland drug-dealing, underemployment and as an underpaid adjunct teaching freshman at multiple colleges, barely comforted by a month's summer respite at the MacDowell artists' colony, Grayson - along with his friends also in their late twenties in a year of rampant inflation, widespread unemployment, and a New York City beset with crime, drugs, and seemingly unstoppable decay - wonders where to go next.
Snapshots of life in New York City in 1980 from the sensibility of a narcissistic, ambitious, depressed, kind-hearted young writer.
It is also available on Scribd for free online reading.
may also be downloaded for free. It is the fifth volume of The Brooklyn Diaries, following Summer in Brooklyn: 1969-1975, Autumn in Brooklyn: 1975, Winter in Brooklyn: 1971-72, Spring in Brooklyn: 1975, and More Summer in Brooklyn: 1976-1979.
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