The promo stuff says in part,
It's the summer of 1990, and writer Richard Grayson -- about to turn 39 and having recently lost forty pounds -- has come up from Florida to spend the summer in his native New York City, shuttling between a friend's Upper West Side apartment where he's lived for the previous six summers and his grandmother's apartment on the beach in Rockaway, where she is suffering from depression and other problems of old age and is ultimately hospitalized for weeks.
For most of the 1980s, Grayson has gotten by as a writer through combining literary grants and income from part-time college teaching and computer education workshops -- and a scheme relying on constantly moving cash advances from the over 40 credit cards that Grayson accumulated during the Greed Decade.
Now, as the national economy falls into an ominous recession -- and war in the Persian Gulf seems imminent -- Grayson's credit card chassis is spinning out of control, with him $150,000 in debt and meager unemployment benefits his only steady income.
Moreover, he recognizes that his career as a fiction writer, never quite viable despite numerous publications, good book reviews, and critical encouragement, is coming to an end. What to do?
He takes up the cause of the beleaguered Miami hip-hop group, 2 Live Crew, whose As Nasty As They Wanna Be CD has been declared obscene by a Florida judge. Grayson's efforts win him national publicity -- and some hate mail from those offended by raunchy rap music. And his satirical campaign to rescue billionaire Donald Trump from bankruptcy are highlighted on CNN and in The New York Post.
As he moves through the city, taking random graduate courses in computer education and creativity at Teachers College, running from bank ATM to bank lobby to deposit the money in his credit chassis, fretting about the future as he wanders around Brooklyn, desperately trying to stir up interest in his poorly-selling books of fiction, and going out to endless lunches and dinners with his many friends -- mostly other writers, theater people, artists, performers, politically-connected lawyers and religious activists -- Grayson recounts his days in the diary he's been keeping obsessively since he was an agoraphobic 18-year-old boy about to start Brooklyn College in the summer of 1969.
Grayson has published the first six volumes of the diaries of his late teens and twenties as THE BROOKLYN DIARIES, featuring SUMMER IN BROOKLYN: 1969-1975; WINTER IN BROOKLYN: 1972-73; SPRING IN BROOKLYN, 1975; AUTUMN IN BROOKLYN, 1978; MORE SUMMERS IN BROOKLYN: 1976-1979; and A YEAR IN ROCKAWAY, 1980.
The second six volumes of his diaries have been published as THE EIGHTIES DIARIES, which include SOUTH FLORIDA WINTERS, 1981-84; LATE SPRING IN SUNRISE, 1982; WEST SIDE SUMMERS, 1984-87; INDIAN SUMMER: PARK SLOPE, 1985; SPRINGTIME IN LAUDERHILL, 1986; and EIGHTIES’ END: AUTUMN, 1987-89.
SUMMER IN NEW YORK: 1990 is the first volume of THE NINETIES DIARIES, immediately preceding LAST SUMMER IN ROCKAWAY:1991 and FIRST FALL IN GAINESVILLE: 1991.
The book is also available on Scribd and Lulu for free online reading.
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