A Writer’s Diary Entries From Early July, 1999 | Richard Grayson

A Writer’s Diary Entries From Early July, 1999 | Richard Grayson

FC2's Fiction Transmission podcast presents "Au Milieu Intérieur," with Richard Grayson and Sarah Blackman

FC2's podcast Fiction Transmission today released an episode, "Au Milieu Intérieur," with Richard Grayson and Sarah Blackman. 

Fiction Collective 2 is a non-profit author-run publisher of innovative fiction, a literary alternative since 1974.

Each week, FC's Fiction Transmission brings listeners a short story from the FC2 archive and a conversation between the author and a guest.

"Au Milieu Intérieur," by Richard Grayson, appeared in the anthology Statements 2: New Fiction by the Fiction Collective, published in 1977, and is read by Madeleine Lambert. In the second part of the program, Richard Grayson is joined by Sarah Blackman.

Fiction Transmission is also available on Apple Podcasts,Spotify, and other platforms.

A 23-Year-Old’s Diary Entries From Early April, 1975 | Thought Catalog

A 23-Year-Old’s Diary Entries From Early April, 1975 | Thought Catalog

A 23-Year-Old's Diary Entries From Mid-October, 1974 | Thought Catalog

A 23-Year-Old's Diary Entries From Mid-October, 1974 | Thought Catalog

Cover of New E-book of Richard Grayson's 1979 Short Story Collection WITH HITLER IN NEW YORK

This is the cover for the forthcoming e-book of our first hardcover short story collection, WITH HITLER IN NEW YORK, originally published by Taplinger in 1979.

B.H. Friedman, RIP

Because of the tragedy in Tucson, it's been a sad weekend, and this morning we were further saddened to learn of the passing of B.H. Friedman, a terrific writer whose nonfiction was justly celebrated but whose fiction -- novels and stories -- deserves wider recognition.

We first learned of B.H. Friedman when his 1974 novel, Museum, was published as part of the opening three books put out by the Fiction Collective; the others were by our Brooklyn College MFA professors, Peter Spielberg and Jonathan Baumbach, the first co-directors of the Collective, where we worked as an editorial assistant.

We read Museum, Friedman's fourth novel, 35 years ago and still recall it as a highly intelligent, spare, well-crafted story that both told us a lot about the art and museum world and delineated a compelling family drama. An excerpt:

Despite its legalistic impersonality, Em knew how difficult this letter must have been to write - or even to have had written. He imagined discussions between lawyer and client about spreading the gift over five years, the lawyer being tactful, Helen being - what? - hopeful? - self - deluding? Despite Alton Riggs's "suggestion," Em had long since decided never to ask her for such a letter, but rather, if necessary, to double his own pledge. Now once again he leaned over and kissed her hollow cheek.

"What about the others, besides Bill?"

"Leslie's the biggest surprise. Though I've often questioned her motives, she did suggest Louis, and she's been absolutely supportive on every design issue that's come up. Maybe she sees the new building as a way to re-establish our side of the family. Whatever it is, she's so excited I'm almost beginning to like her."

"As children you were closer than you think," Helen shut her eyes for a moment, trying to remember. "You teased her and she bossed you and all that, but underneath I'm not sure if you two didn't get along better than most brothers do with older sisters."

Em wasn't sure either. He shrugged, moved on to the remaining member of his committee: Ellis Murdoch.

"He attended this last meeting. He's just back from Europe-"

"I know. He's the only one from the museum, besides you, who's come to see me. The people from other organizations I'm involved with visit, but your family - I wouldn't give a dime to the museum, if it weren't for you-" Her eyes shut again - and her mouth, on an unintelligible phrase, perhaps "and your father."

"Until Ellis returned Byron Lord had been feeding us the information about the museum's operation. D'you know By?"

There was no response. Helen was asleep, breathing deeply. Em tiptoed from the room. All that about Ellis's and By's opposed ideas concerning lighting, hanging, systems of movable partitioning, almost everything - all that could wait until Em's next visit.

In the New York Times, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt called it "the most intellectually stimulating of the three [Fiction Collective's initial] books" and said it "poses interesting questions about the function of museums and offers credible fly-on-the-boardroom-wall views of the way such institutions are run." For us, a kid who knew nothing about the art world, it was an insider's peek and a meditation on the limits of idealism written by an erudite literary mensch who was, in his daily life, a highly successful businessman and executive.

B.H. Friedman, of course, was best known for his innovative and magisterial biographies of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and Jackson Pollack, but his fiction was also first-rate. Especially his stories: his collection Moving In won the CCLM Award and his collection Duplex (our favorite) won the Nelson Algren Award. His last book of short fiction, Swimming Laps: Stories and Meditations, proved that he never lost his touch, even in his seventies.

The first non-family trustee of the Whitney Museum Board of Trustees, B.H. Friedman was beloved by many in the art world. We offer condolences to his family and hope that lovers of literature will check out his books of fiction if they're not familiar with his work.

He was the one of the most gentlemanly writers we dealt with as an editorial assistant at the Fiction Collective in the mid-1970s and a different kind of role model than our creative writing professors. Like many others, we will miss him.

Richard Grayson's "I Saw Mommy Kissing Citicorp" published in THE UPPER EAST SIDE MAGAZINE

Richard Grayson's story, "I Saw Mommy Kissing Citicorp," has been published in the summer/fall 2010 issue of The Upper East Side Magazine.

Dan Wickett reviews Richard Grayson's HIGHLY IRREGULAR STORIES at Emerging Writers Network

Today, in continuing coverage of Short Story Month 2010 at Emerging Writers Network, Dan Wickett reviews a number of short story collections, including our own Highly Irregular Stories:

This book republishes four chapbooks originally published in the 70's and 80's. Grayson's books remind me of Stephen Dixon's to a degree. The main way that they do is that they are written in a style that is all his own and you're either going to love it, or wonder why others do. I fall into the love it category. The writing seems simple, but my personal guess is that it takes a huge amount of work on Grayson's part to get the writing to seem as such. Which should probably have me comparing him to somebody like Richard Brautigan. His stories are also funny as hell, leading me to realize that Richard Grayson really has nobody to be compared to - he's a unique writer and one with many books to take a flier on - this one was a really good one.

MY PLAN TO KILL HENRY KISSINGER by Richard Grayson now available at Amazon Kindle Store

Richard Grayson's My Plan to Kill Henry Kissinger is now available at Amazon's Kindle Store for 99¢.

Here is the promo material for the 111-page $6.99 paperback edition from Art Pants Company:

In these ten quirky, strangely compelling Richard Grayson stories — all of them first published in literary magazines and anthologies in the late 1970s — young people in their late teens and early twenties learn how to live in a world of weirdness:

A young man's mother hides under the bed while he has sex with his girlfriend. A porpoise directs and stars in a production of Thornton Wilder's "Our Town" for an audience of one boy. A young woman claims her TV set won't work properly even though an attractive repairman assures her there's nothing wrong with it. A famous bodybuilder remembers his chronic childhood constipation. A 16-year-old boy tells an interviewer he aspires to be "a friend to the friendless." A delivery boy for a florist shop sees his first dead body. And in the title story, the roommate of a boy who couldn't stand anyone to say the word "Stanford" in his presence explodes in rage at former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, with surprising results.

“The incessant familiarity of the writer’s secret self makes his world entertaining and bizarre. The dialogue is consistently, even ingeniously funny…bright and keenly made.”
— The New York Times Book Review

These stories originally appeared, in somewhat different form, in the following literary magazines and anthologies: Street Bagel (1980); Westbere Review (1977); Coffee Break (1978); Hudson River Anthology (1978); Dragon Fire, Dancing Dogs and Dangling Dreams (Meadows of Dan, VA: Northwoods Press, 1978); Beyond Baroque (1979); Lowlands Review (1978); The Penny Dreadful (1979); and Zone .

"18 X 1969" by Richard Grayson now available at Amazon Kindle store

Richard Grayson's 18 X 1969 is now available at Amazon's Kindle Store for 99¢.

Here is the promo material for the 104-page $6.99 paperback edition from Art Pants Company:

In 1969, an 18-year-old boy becomes obsessed with an actress from an X-rated movie. Teenage Tarzan wants to get to know the southern parts of Nashville Pussycat. College students face pregnancy scares and speeches by racist physicists. In Wisconsin, David can't fall asleep next to his ex-girlfriend for fear that he'll get an erection during the night. A young superhero rescues his beloved psychologist from an evil gorilla but falls into a depression afterwards. A drug-addled adolescent mourning the death of his sister flirts with his father's young wife in his maternal grandparents' bedroom. A 16-year-old girl meets a boy on a bus who correctly guesses that she plays the flute.

In these weirdly affecting, sweetly sensuous stories, Richard Grayson paints portraits of the generation that came of age in the Age of Aquarius. First published decades ago, these stories prove every bit as relevant today as they did back when peace symbols first became fashionable and summers of love lingered too long.

These stories originally appeared, in somewhat different form, in the following literary magazines: Mississippi Mud, 1978; Junction, 1976; Snapdragon, 1979; Chunga Review, 1980; Maxy’s Journal, 1978; Westerly Review, 1976; Not Guilty!, 1981; and Waters, 1978.

SIXTEEN ATTEMPTS TO JUSTIFY MY EXISTENCE by Richard Grayson now available at Amazon Kindle store

Richard Grayson's Sixteen Attempts to Justify My Existence is now available at Amazon's Kindle Store for 99¢.

Here is the promo material for the 114-page $6.99 paperback edition from Art Pants Company:

A boy puts Pepto-Bismol tablets in his socks during gym class with a hated teacher. Two college students wear yarmulkes so they can smoke marijuana in public without being arrested. A car thief thoughtfully returns his victim's overdue books to the Brooklyn Public Library. A teenage boy lists 69 reasons men should date his Aunt Aisha. A governor facing re-election is haunted by his dead mother and his habit of eating sand.

In the oddball pieces, fictional or perhaps not, by Richard Grayson, a writer hailed by Publishers Weekly as "a versatile, interesting experimenter," SIXTEEN ATTEMPTS TO JUSTIFY MY EXISTENCE presents an infinite number of reasons to read the work of an author Library Journal called "a born storyteller and standup talker."

The pieces in Sixteen Attempts to Justify My Existence originally appeared in the magazines Foothill Quarterly, Pikestaff Forum, X: A Journal of the Arts and Harpoon; the webzines 55 Words, Thieves Jargon and Tuesday Shorts; and the blog Edward Champion's Return of the Reluctant.

DR. PATEL'S PLANETS by Richard Grayson now available at Amazon Kindle store

Richard Grayson's Dr. Patel's Planets is now available at Amazon's Kindle Store for 99¢.

Here is the promo material for the 137-page $7.99 paperback edition from Art Pants Company:

DR. PATEL'S PLANETS collects nine of Richard Grayson's most affecting stories. Originally published in literary magazines and webzines between 1975 and 2006, the narratives in DR. PATEL'S PLANETS feature such diverse characters as alienated teenagers flirting in the 1970s, a middle-aged gay teacher with prostate cancer, denizens of computer labs and flea markets in 1980s South Florida, a college student finding love in a pre-Katrina New Orleans supermarket, an Indian-American physician on the lookout for extra-solar worlds, and a cuddly Vietnamese pig waiting for a law professor.

The stories in Dr. Patel's Planets originally appeared in the webzines Pindeldyboz, Eclectica, Six Little Things and Spillway Review and the magazines New Writers, Hanging Loose, Lynx Eye and Washington Review of the Arts.

THOSE SEVENTIES STORIES by Richard Grayson now available at Amazon Kindle Store

Richard Grayson's Those Seventies Stories is now available at Amazon's Kindle Store for 99¢.

Here is the promo material for the 126-page $7.99 paperback edition from Art Pants Company:

The quirky quintet of Me Decade tales collected in THOSE SEVENTIES STORIES, all originally published back in the day in literary magazines like Bellingham Review, Brooklyn Literary Review and Browns Mills Review, feature the short fiction of Richard Grayson (WITH HITLER IN NEW YORK, I BRAKE FOR DELMORE SCHWARTZ, THE SILICON VALLEY DIET), who has been hailed by Library Journal as "a born storyteller," by Publishers Weekly as "a versatile, interesting experimenter" and by The New York Times Book Review as "entertaining and bizarre."

The stories in Those Seventies Stories originally appeared, in somewhat different form, in the following literary magazines: “Those Seventies Stories” (“Fractions of Life”) Bellingham Review, 1979; "Roman Buildings," Snakeroots, 1976; "A Wake in One Zone," Three Sisters, 1976; “Life with Libby,” Brooklyn Literary Review, 1983; and “Plant Parenthood,” Browns Mills Review, 1980.

LET THE READER BEWARE by Richard Grayson now available at Amazon Kindle store

Richard Grayson's Let the Reader Beware is now available at Amazon's Kindle Store for 99¢.

Here is the promo material for the 129-page $7.99 paperback edition from Art Pants Company:

Hipster Book Club has said: "Richard Grayson is a meta-fictionalist of the old school, where structure is often as important as narrative, where the story is sometimes hidden in structural tricks like diary entries, lists, and jokes."

The nine stories in LET THE READER BEWARE were originally published in literary magazines between 1976 and 1981, but, as Hipster Book Club noted, "Grayson has such a fresh approach to writing that these stories don't seem dated. In some ways, Grayson may remind readers of a younger Woody Allen — an intellectual who ponders the nature of existence yet is remarkably funny while discussing life, death, and capitalism. Like much of the meta-fiction oeuvre, Grayson often writes stories about writing stories. The trick with this genre is to make sure the reader can find the story...Grayson succeeds here — the lists and diary entries reveal his passion for finding new ways to tell a story."

The stories in Let the Reader Beware originally appeared in the following literary magazines: “Let the Reader Beware," Juice, 1977; "My Grandfather's Other Son," Writ, 1981; "My Life as an Old Comic," Continental Drift, 1982; "The Greatest Short Story that Absolutely Ever Was," Lowlands Review, 1979; "Narcissism and Me," Bogg, 1980; “A Disjointed Fiction,” X: A Journal of the Arts, 1978; “Unobtrusive Methods, Inchoate Designs," Westerly Review, 1977; "An Appropriated Story," City, 1976; and “An Irregular Story," Lowlands Review, 1978.

OH KHRUSHCHEV, MY KHRUSHCHEV by Richard Grayson now available at Amazon Kindle store

Richard Grayson's Oh Khrushchev, My Khrushchev is now available at Amazon's Kindle Store for 99¢.

Here is the promo material for the 120-page $7.99 paperback edition from Art Pants Company:

The six stories in OH KHRUSHCHEV, MY KHRUSHCHEV, all previously published in literary magazines from 1978 to 1994, feature baby boomers growing up in the shadow of the Cold War from the Eisenhower era of the 1950s into full yuppiehood during the Reagan revolution of the 1980s and beyond. One boy's crush on Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, junior high recitations of the poem "Invictus," the reaction of Columbia University students to the 1970 Kent State killings, suicide attempts both failed and successful, endless protest marches, a woman's struggle with computer programming on an old Apple IIc, discreet banks in the Cayman Islands, monthly condo board meetings, screenwriters in the Hollywood Hills, and federal bankruptcy court in the district of Southern Florida -- all of this and more are craftily delineated and diagrammed in Richard Grayson's playful portraits of an American generation coping with unrelenting change.

BONIATOS ARE NOT BORING by Richard Grayson now available at Amazon Kindle Store

Richard Grayson's Boniatos Are Not Boring is now available at Amazon's Kindle Store for 99¢.

Here is the promo material for the 125-page $7.99 paperback edition from Art Pants Company:

Some misguided souls think that boniatos - the tropical sweet potatoes beloved in South Florida - are boring.

Not Richard Grayson, author of BONIATOS ARE NOT BORING, who appreciates this Latin Caribbean tuber in all its morning glory. Out of boniatos and other supposedly ordinary things - the French game of Mille Bornes, a system for transmitting business data, a junior high production of "The King and I," out-of-the-way Vietnamese shopping malls in Silicon Valley, the display advertising department of the Village Voice and sunbathing in the middle of San Francisco - can be made magically inventive short stories, slices of American life as filling and satisfying as, well, boniatos themselves.

SALUGI AT STARBUCKS by Richard Grayson now available at Amazon Kindle Store

Richard Grayson's Salugi at Starbucks is now available at Amazon's Kindle Store for 99¢.

Here is the promo material for the 124-page $7.99 paperback edition from Art Pants Company:

In this quartet of stories about late 20th century gay relationships gone awry, Richard Grayson's young male characters are always looking in all the wrong places. As The American Book Review wrote:

"They are young gay men trying to survive in a hostile or marginally accepting world. They conduct themselves with manic cheer. They possess a grace and courage that have to substitute for the acceptance and love that most people look for. Their successes in this sphere are meager; their disappointments, many.

Yet, despite a seeming similarity in their drives – and palpable coincidences of character and action – Grayson rarely palls. His young men are imbued with a sweet, endearing nuttiness that serves both to energize and individualize. He depicts our cyberspace and e-mail age, so convenient for rapidly dissolving and re-forming associations, invariably against a backdrop of the search for sincere love and the deaths that ravage gay men and their partners."

MOON OVER MOLDOVA by Richard Grayson now available at Amazon Kindle Store

Richard Grayson's Moon Over Moldova is now available at Amazon's Kindle Store for 99¢.

Here is the promo material for the 103-page $6.99 paperback edition from Art Pants Company:

MOON OVER MOLDOVA presents three stories by acclaimed writer Richard Grayson. In "Moon Over Moldova," while a Southern college town is rocked by a gay rights referendum, a grad student finds even a "backward" former Soviet republic a refuge from personal and political turmoil. In "Boys Club," a queercore band's bassist has a crush on the group's insufferably punker-than-thou lead singer. And "Anything But Sympathy" artfully conflates stories about elderly nursing home residents; the real-life power broker and "uncrowned king of Florida," banker Ed Hall; young actors and others dying too young of AIDS; and a thirtysomething teacher's affair with a teenage boy who seems to know a lot more than he does. Publishers Weekly called Richard Grayson's uniquely quirky narratives "lighter and funnier than most gay fiction" and The Sun-Sentinel noted: "Although memorial services for young men seem commonplace in Grayson's fiction, the stories are not tragedies. They are funny, intelligently written and original."

THE BOY WHO FELL TO BROOKLYN by Richard Grayson now available at Amazon Kindle Store

Richard Grayson's The Boy Who Fell to Brooklyn is now available at Amazon's Kindle Store for 99¢.

Here is the promo material for the 158-page $7.99 paperback edition from Art Pants Company:

In these nine idiosyncratic stories collected from literary magazines, acclaimed author (WITH HITLER IN NEW YORK, LINCOLN'S DOCTOR'S DOG) Richard Grayson appealingly employs snapshots of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s in what Kirkus Reviews has called his "comic fiction crammed with details adopted from pop culture and the daily news."

The title story, about the 1960 Park Slope plane crash, appeared in the University of Miami literary magazine Mangrove. Other stories in the book originally appeared in the print magazines Small Spiral Notebook, Albany Review, X: A Journal of the Arts, Star-Web Paper, and Mati; and the webzines Surgery of Modern Warfare, Pindeldyboz, Wandering Army, Mosaic Minds, and FRiGG Magazine.

VAMPIRES OF NORTHWEST ARKANSAS by Richard Grayson now available at Amazon Kindle Store

Richard Grayson's Vampires of Northwest Arkansas is now available at Amazon's Kindle Store for 99¢.

Here is the promo material for the 149-page $7.99 paperback edition from Art Pants Company:

Ten stories by acclaimed short story writer Richard Grayson (WITH HITLER IN NEW YORK, I SURVIVED CARACAS TRAFFIC, LINCOLN'S DOCTOR'S DOG, I BRAKE FOR DELMORE SCHWARTZ, WHO WILL KISS THE PIG?: SEX STORIES FOR TEENS) spotlight gay men coping with unusual situations: a best friend and fellow former prostitute bitten by an Ozarks bat in the wake of 9/11; a boyfriend morbidly worried about an impending worldwide chocolate shortage; an Orthodox Jew who consults his rabbi because a lover refuses to ever remove his socks during sex; a young African-American college student on a homophobic campus who has to care for his Muslim roommate’s therapy monkey; a Wyoming cattle ranch manager dealing with an outbreak of leafy spurge on his land; a Brooklyn man with a younger Japanese lover reflecting on his Williamsburg neighborhood’s demographic transitions from Italian to Hispanic to hipster to yuppie; a writer confronting on his past affair with his much younger stepbrother and contrasting his adventures with those of the comic book superhero Green Arrow; a Puerto Rican teacher compelled to watch shirtless teabag-eating white boys online; a former babysitter of the actor Laurence Fishburne unable to understand the young gay Phoenix couple who are his tenants; and a Florida man haunted by the shuttered suburban movie theaters of his youth. Wickedly funny and weirdly profound, these talky stories weave a startling tapestry of quirky gay life in the America of the last two decades.

The pieces originally appeared in the such webzines (most now defunct) as VerbSap, Opium, Rio, Me Three, Apogee, The Magazine Shiver, The Rumpus and Pug Magazine.