Thursday Evening in Chelsea: The 6th Annual LGBT Immigration Fair & Cultural Event at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center

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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.

Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel reviews Richard Grayson's THE SILICON VALLEY DIET

In today's book review section, The Sun-Sentinel of Fort Lauderdale reviews Richard Grayson's The Silicon Valley Diet:

The (Fort Lauderdale) Sun-Sentinel (May 28, 2000):


Snapshots of modern humanity

By PAT MACENULTY


THE SILICON VALLEY DIET AND OTHER STORIES. Richard
Grayson. Red Hen Press. $14.95.

Most readers will find something familiar in the ninth collection of short stories, a paperback original, by the Fort Lauderdale author and college instructor Richard Grayson.

I, for one, enjoyed revisiting my old stomping grounds of Plantation and Tallahassee, and being reminded of the taste of croissants from Zabar's in Manhattan. I nodded as I read Grayson's renditions of the daily dramas that unfold in e-mails, the concerns with what we eat, the trauma of teaching community college students to write five-paragraph essays and the quest for good, if not always true, love.

Gay readers will most likely appreciate the affectionate and funny portrayals of gay men in tender and troubled relationships. Straight readers shouldn't have any problems identifying, either. All the protagonists in these stories seem to be looking for the kind of lifelong commitment that Mom and Dad embodied.

Although memorial services for young men seem commonplace in Grayson's fiction, the stories are not tragedies. They serve up slices of life as we know it right here and now with hate crimes, weight worries and easy money for Internet whizzes.

Structurally, the stories do not provide traditionally rendered scenes, and they don't move linearly along from point A to point B to point C and so on. Many of them are broken up with italicized passages that serve as a counterpoint to the narrative. I like stories that bring disparate ideas together, but occasionally when reading them en masse, the technique becomes superfluous.

That small quibble aside, let me say that the stories overall are funny, intelligently written and original. "Spaghetti Language" mixes the narrator's love for a dead grandfather, a friend's beautiful 4-year-old child, and his lover, Terence, a gorgeous, tall, young black man who appears in several stories with learning computer programming language. There is a connection.

"Boys' Club" drops the reader smack dab into the lives of a gay punk band. This is probably the most traditional story and my favorite. The narrative voice is so authentically young and misunderstood and rebellious and poignantly philosophical: "Anarchism doesn't only mean destroying the government. It could
also mean destroying the forces dictating how people have to live. It was more acceptable to be out in the punk scene than in mainstream music culture even before you were able to slam around with other boyfags in lingerie."

Grayson's writing is full of delicious nuggets. Here's an insight in the title story about the narrator's hunt for a meaningful relationship: "I'd long ago given up going to slaughterhouses and trying to approach aspiring Abercrombie & Fitch catalog models emitting radiation from isotopes of unobtainium. After enough `access denied' messages, you don't want to do anything but log off."

Other cool stories include "Those Old Dark, Sweet Songs," about the narrator's complicated relationship with Terence; "The Five Stages of Eating at Cuban-Chinese Restaurants," in which Terence breaks up with the narrator; and "Anything but Sympathy" about a 30-year-old man's first relationship with another man.

These stories accurately capture snapshots of our culture at a very interesting moment. The Silicon Valley Diet and Other Stories sets out to prove we haven't really lost our humanity under the deluge of technology. And we probably never will.

Pat MacEnulty, a former promotional writer for the Sun-Sentinel, is a short-story writer and freelance fiction editor in Charlotte, N.C.

The San Francisco Voice reviews Richard Grayson's WITH HITLER IN NEW YORK

The current (December 29, 1979) issue of the San Francisco Voice has a review by Daniel Curzon of Richard Grayson's With Hitler in New York:


WITH HITLER IN NEW YORK and OTHER STORIES, by Richard Grayson.
Taplinger Publishing Co., 200 Park Ave. South, NY, NY 10003

Buy this book! It's wonderful. It costs only $7.95. Where else can you get as much pleasure -- both emotional and intellectual -- for so little?

At first I thought With Hitler in New York wasn’t very gay in its content, but the stories get gayer later in the book. Richard Grayson is a real writer, whether he’s writing on gay themes or not. He’s witty and deep, playful and honest. I don’t know whether he is gay or not. I hope he is, because we need all the first-rate writing we can get. If encouraged, Grayson might more explicitly gay-themed stories. (indeed, if all the gay writers wrote about gay life and left straight life to the straight writers, there’d be precious little straight stuff written)

If you’ve been reading the bulk of the books coming out of the big New York presses and finding yourself slowly starving to death for genuine artistic nourishment, buy this book. For the truth, dear friends, is that if readers who like soul-satisfying fiction don’t buy these books when they appear – less and less often, please note – then very soon they won’t be able to buy them at all. They simply won’t be published, and we can all die of literary malnutrition.

The situation in publishing is much worse than I suspected. I’ve always discounted the so-called American preoccupation with making money. But I’ve come to realize at last that vulgar is really all that publishers care about. The corporations are destroying literature. They must be stopped. They are robber barons, neither pure nor simple, who care only about profits, profits, and more profits, just like the oil companies. If you think this doesn’t matter, just remember that these corporations control what you read. They have a monopoly on the market. They must be required to publish quality fiction in the same way that the FCC requires TV and radio stations to broadcast some quality programming. No corporation should be allowed to keep true literature out of your hands just because they have the power to do so.

Don’t read With Hitler in New York all at once. The blunt, declarative sentences are best appreciated when spread out. I also think the author shouldn’t have included three stories about how hard it is to write a story. Two would have been enough.

But there is much here that is truly beautifully done, like the story about an uncle the narrator hates, and “The Princess from the Land of Porcelain,” which may be the finest story about a lesbian ever written.

Richard Grayson probably had to ill to get a collection of stories published by anybody in these disgusting days. The least the literate reader can do is avoid the chaff from Avon, Dell, and the like, and get this book, the real stuff.

-- Daniel Curzon / IGNA