THE HIPSTER HUCKLEBERRY FINN now available at Amazon Kindle Store from East Flatbush University Press for 99 cents

East Flatbush University Press, a division of Dumbo Books of Brooklyn, is happy to announce that due to overwhelming popular demand (thanks to GalleyCat, Gothamist, The Village Voice, and many others), THE HIPSTER HUCKLEBERRY FINN is now available at the Amazon Kindle Store for 99 cents.

As in the print edition, THE HIPSTER HUCKLEBERRY FINN is a classroom-friendly version of Mark Twain's classic novel with every occurrence of the N-word replaced by the word "hipster." Thanks to editor Richard Grayson, the adventures of Huck and Jim are now neither offensive nor uncool.

East Flatbush University Press publishes "The Hipster HUCKLEBERRY FINN" -- with every occurrence of the N-word replaced by the word "hipster"

The East Flatbush University Press division of Dumbo Books is proud to announce the book publication of The Hipster HUCKLEBERRY FINN, a new classroom-friendly edition of Mark Twain's classic novel with every occurrence of the N-word replaced by the word "hipster."

Thanks to editor Richard Grayson, the adventures of Huckleberry Finn are now neither offensive nor uncool. The 383-page trade paperback edition is available for $18.99 or can be downloaded for free. The text is also available on a Dumbo Books website.

Dumbo Books publishes THE BROOKLYN DIARIES by Richard Grayson; available on Amazon Kindle

Dumbo Books has published THE BROOKLYN DIARIES by Richard Grayson. It is available in a large-sized (8.5" x 11") 623-page paperback edition for $39.99 and as an ebook at the Amazon Kindle store for one dollar.

It is a compilation of all six books of Richard Grayson's diary entries: SUMMER IN BROOKLYN (1969-1975), AUTUMN IN BROOKLYN (1978), WINTER IN BROOKLYN (1971-72), SPRING IN BROOKLYN (1975), MORE SUMMER IN BROOKLYN (1976-1979) and A YEAR IN ROCKAWAY (1980). The book is also available for free as a download at Lulu or Scribd.

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.

Dumbo Books Foundation/Betty Smith Award for Brooklyn Writers Winner for 2009 Announced

The Dumbo Books Foundation is pleased to announce the winner of the first annual Dumbo Books Foundation/Betty Smith Award for Brooklyn Writers.

The award will be given annually to a distinguished writer, residing in Brooklyn, who exemplifies the tradition and excellence of Betty Smith in her classic novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

The award, given in an amount corresponding to the writer’s ZIP code, ranges from $112.01 for residents of downtown Brooklyn, Brooklyn Heights and DUMBO to $112.39 for residents of Starrett City.

Candidates for the Dumbo Books Foundation/Betty Smith Award for Brooklyn Writers are proposed by nominators from across the borough whose experience and vocations bring them in contact with individuals of extraordinary talent.

Winners are chosen by a selection committee, a small group of recognized writers, literary scholars, and editors, appointed annually by the Foundation.

Both nominators and selectors serve anonymously. The Dumbo Books Foundation does not accept applications or nominations for the award.

The 2009 winner is Tao Lin of Williamsburg, who will receive an award in the amount of $112.11.

Sunday Morning in Williamsburg: Complacencies of the Peignoir and Nature in Our Own Backyard

After getting our laundry done at the Metro Laundromat by 7 a.m., we headed for our own Dumbo Books HQ backyard, which on this late summer Sunday morning seems to be returning to a state of nature.

Who says Williamsburg isn't green?

The grapes on the vine look good.


Four hundred years ago, when Henry Hudson sailed, we figure much of north Brooklyn looked like this, no? Only without apartment buildings.

Some of the figs have ripened, but most have not, it looks like.


These buildings face Metropolitan Avenue.

It was cloudy and cool early this morning.


Twice we got tangled up in the vines as they met and held us prisoner momentarily.




We really like the vines getting all tangled.


The vines are climbing up the fire escapes.


And plants are growing by the steps to the back door.

We're really, really grateful to have use of this great Williamsburg backyard.

It's a perfect place to sit early Sunday morning to drink iced tea and read the newspaper.

Financially-troubled small press publisher Dumbo Books of Brooklyn files for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Protection

This morning we are issuing the following press release:

Brooklyn, N.Y., Feb. 23, 2009 — Dumbo Books of Brooklyn has announced that it filed for Chapter 11 protection from its creditors on Monday, saying a massive slump in revenue from book sales was to blame.

The company owns a small press publisher of literary books and three nondaily online newspapers, including The Los Angeles World-Telegram & Star, and has about 3.5 employees.

According to Richard Grayson, the company’s chief restructuring officer who filed a declaration in the case, unaudited financial statements for the fiscal year ending Nov. 30 reported $5,963 in assets and $18,692 in debt, including unpaid interest. Revenue has fallen more than 70 percent since 2006, the company said in bankruptcy court documents filed in Delaware.

Grayson said in a statement that Dumbo Books "anticipates that the Chapter 11 process will allow it to significantly reduce debt from its balance sheet while facilitating a strategic reorganization of the company, which will place it in the strongest possible position to sustain its momentum despite extremely challenging market conditions for books like Who Will Kiss the Pig? Sex Stories for Teens, which up until recently was 3,765,633 on Amazon's best seller list."

Dumbo Books, based in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn despite its name, proposes a restructuring in which it would cancel its stock — it traded for less than one cent on Friday — and become controlled by its lenders.

Grayson called the filing "ironic," noting, "Just like most of the few remaining readers of our books, we couldn't get past Chapter 11."

Financially-Troubled Small Press Publisher Dumbo Books of Brooklyn Announces Acquisition of California Newspaper Chain

This afternoon we are issuing the following press release:

BROOKLYN, N.Y., Feb. 19, 2009 - The financially troubled small press publisher Dumbo Books of Brooklyn, in what insiders describe as a last-ditch effort to avoid filing for bankruptcy, today announced that it was acquiring the California Newspaper Chain in a stock swap valued at an undisclosed amount.

Dumbo Books is a publisher of literary books headquartered in Brooklyn. The California Newspaper Chain's properties include its flagship Los Angeles World-Telegram & Star, The San Jose Journal-American, The Phoenix Citizen Record-Examiner and The Miami Globe-Democrat.

"We believe that this purchase will allow us a little breathing room with our creditors in this difficult economic climate," said Dumbo Books chief financial officer Richard Grayson. "It will give us added streams of revenue."

Shares of both companies closed lower yesterday.

Small Press Publisher Dumbo Books of Brooklyn, Converting to a Bank Holding Company, Announces Its Split into a "Good Publisher" and a "Bad Publisher"

Today we are issuing the following press release:

BROOKLYN, N.Y., January 29, 2009 - Small press publisher Dumbo Books of Brooklyn today announced that pending approval of its application to the Federal Reserve to convert into a bank holding company so that it will be able to accept deposits and be eligible for federal bailout funds, it will immediately split itself into a "good publisher" and a "bad publisher" in order to isolate toxic assets that could drive the company into bankruptcy and financial ruin.

Dumbo Books, the "good" publisher, will accept government bailout funds and refuse to lend any money to anyone.

Dumbo Books of Brooklyn, the "bad" publisher, will publish books by Brooklyn hipsters and Tao Lin's friends.

Facing Declining Sales and Possible Bankruptcy, Dumbo Books of Brooklyn Announces "Buy One, Shoplift One Free" Policy

At a time of economic crisis and sputtering holiday sales, today's New York Times has a front-page story detailing how the only rising retail trend is shoplifting ("As Economy Dips, Arrests for Shoplifting Soar").

According to a nationwide nonprofit association, more than $35 million in merchandise is stolen each day nationwide, and about one in 11 people in America have shoplifted.

Authors, publishers and bookstores are urging people to buy, buy, buy books to keep the industry afloat -- to little avail, it seems, as Borders teeters on bankruptcy and New York publishers announce massive layoffs. As our very smart friend Jason Boog writes today in Salon:

On Dec. 3, now known as "Black Wednesday," several major American publishers were dramatically downsized, leaving many celebrated editors and their colleagues jobless. The bad news stretches from the unemployment line to bookstores to literature itself.

As Tom Engelhardt writes in The Atlantic:

Traffic at many bookstores nationwide has evidently slowed to a trickle. Book orders have reportedly fallen off a cliff. It's now being said that, in this Christmas season, no popular book is selling so well as to be unavailable. In other words, if you want it, it's going to be at your local Barnes & Noble. For publishing, that's like an obituary.

As at most retail outfits, the only action in bookstores these days is shoplifters surreptitiously stuffing volumes under their coats. Melville House has announced the publication of Tao Lin's how-to guide Shoplifting from American Apparel in 2009.

Dumbo Books is facing the same problems as General Motors. People are not buying our quality American-made products. So, in order to stave off bankruptcy and financial ruin and disgrace, etc., we are announcing this new policy:

BUY ONE, SHOPLIFT ONE FREE!

That's right. Dumbo Books has made arrangements with the retail outlets that carry our books that any shopper buying one Dumbo Books book will be allowed to shoplift a second Dumbo Books book of equal, greater or lesser literary value absolutely FREE -- free of any chance of criminal prosecution.

So you too can experience the thrill of shoplifting without putting yourself in legal jeopardy if you buy a Dumbo Books book today!

(Illustration stolen from the very talented artist James Yamasaki.)

BUY ONE, SHOPLIFT ONE FREE!

Happy holidays!

* * *

(This offer not valid for any other publisher's books. Limited by availability. Contact Richard Grayson, Esq. for any legal advice.)

Small Press Publisher Dumbo Books of Brooklyn Announces Its Conversion to a Bank Holding Company, Applies for Bailout Funds

This morning we are issuing the following press release:

BROOKLYN, N.Y., Nov. 14, 2008 - Small press publisher Dumbo Books of Brooklyn today announced that it was applying to the Federal Reserve to convert into a bank holding company so that it will be able to accept deposits and be eligible for federal bailout funds.

"This will help us survive in these perilous times for everyone, including small publishers of literary works," said Dumbo Books CEO Richard Grayson. "We want to avoid the fate of other small publishers, like Impetus Books, which have recently shut down due to the economic climate."

"The bailout cash from the Treasury Department will greatly help secure the future of Dumbo Books," Grayson said.

Kirkus Discoveries reviews WHO WILL KISS THE PIG?: SEX STORIES FOR TEENS by Richard Grayson

Kirkus Discoveries today posted its review of Richard Grayson's Who Will Kiss the Pig?: Sex Stories for Teens:

WHO WILL KISS THE PIG?: Sex Stories for Teens

Author: Grayson, Richard

Review Date: AUGUST 07, 2008
Publisher:DUMBO Books (146 pp.)
Price (paperback): $13.50
Publication Date: 2008
ISBN (paperback): 978-0-6152-0547-2
Category: AUTHORS
Classification: FICTION

A career-spanning compilation of fascinating short fiction and flash fiction from Grayson (And to Think that He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street, 2006, etc.), ranging from his first published story (1975’s “Rampant Burping”) to fresh work.

Rooted in post-modernism, Grayson’s economical writing style abets a natural gift for storytelling, and his tales are imbued with a comic touch—whether darkly so, or merely playful. In one example of the former, a caustic protagonist in “Those Seventies Stories” pretends to be one of a pair of twin brothers whenever he frequents area diners in order to alternately abuse and sympathize with a dull yet harmless local. The immediately preceding “The Life of Katz,” on the other hand, seems to be little more than an exercise in enumerating a litany of dog- and cat-related puns and idioms. This kind of nonchalance usually plays to Grayson’s strengths, but sometimes his tendency toward self-indulgence gets the better of him. A few stories find the author employing tics to mark his fiction as quirky—“An Appropriated Story,” for instance, uses the copyright symbol as a scene break—or using formal subversion to oversell his point, as in “Unobtrusive Methods, Inchoate Designs,” whose narrator breaks the fourth wall to deliver a brief, meta-fictional address on the nature of reality and perception that only renders the story frivolous. At his best, though, Grayson deftly explores the dilemmas of suspended youth—specifically the ache of the lovelorn, the search for purpose and the tendency to cling desperately to the familiar. To many of his characters, this means remaining perpetually in academia, earning advanced degrees while struggling to choose career paths or endlessly returning to camp as counselors late into their 20s (“Life with Libby”). In “Albertson’s Pulls Out of New Orleans,” an Idaho transplant to the Deep South is almost unreasonably obsessed with a local branch of his hometown supermarket chain, to the point of ineptly transferring his affections for the brand onto one of its cashiers.

Funny, pleasurable and often prescient short fiction that delivers many more hits than misses.

The book is for sale at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million and at places in other countries that should know better, like Blackwell (UK), Buecher (Germany), Ellipse Librairie (Switzerland), and Bokkilden (Norway).

Three decades ago, on May 1, 1979, Kirkus Reviews looked at our first story collection:

Grayson, Richard
WITH HITLER IN NEW YORK
And Other Stories
Taplinger
$7.95
6/15 LC 78-20695
SBN: 8008-8406-X

Grayson has little more to offer than a lot of youthful energy in this collection; he gives each of his story a good shove--but that's about it. Hitler, for example, arrives in Brooklyn to no great effect: "Ellen's mother doesn't talk to Hitler except to say 'Pass me that salt bagel.'"--and it's that one joke over and over. In Grayson's vignettes of normal Jewish family life, his autobiographical hand isn't shy to show himself, but he does nothing with the raw material. Other pieces fall into a flat, modish style: "Mara wants to go to the North sea. Helmut has too much work to do. Go alone, he tells her. But she wants to know how he will get up in the morning without her. Helmut sighs and says he can manage it. But Mara feels guilty and decides to stay home." There's the requisite self-conscious humor: a short story criticizes back its idle readers, a character named Placenta cries, "You're the narrator, you do something." What Grayson lacks most seems to be patience and follow-through; after offering an outrageous premise or a few jokes, he doesn't know what to do--so he merely repeats them. A bit of promise, then--but as a storytelling craftsman, Grayson has a long, long way to go.

And three years later, on May 1, 1982, this was in Kirkus Reviews:

Grayson, Richard
LINCOLN'S DOCTOR'S DOG
And Other Stories
White Ewe $11.95
5/5 LC: 81-69117
ISBN:978-0-917976-13-1

Grayson's two story collections--With Hitler in New York (1979) and this new one--together suggest the literary equivalent of a kid's messy room: cozy for the kid, junk strewn everywhere, but a little horrifying to anyone standing at the doorway. Grayson's most constant character here is himself-as-writer: "Please: you can see I'm a sick person. What would it take, a few pages in your lousy literary magazine, to make me happy? . . . If I can't have your respect, I'll settle for your pity. . . ." And pitiful indeed are many of these stories--cheap, silly, little more than names, puns, and jokes about the author's desperation for readers (hence the title). Still, there is something boorishly, oddly charming about Grayson's ability to stop in the middle of some childishly junky piece to ask, sincerely: "When I write myself into a corner, as I have done once more, do you have to give me credit for trying?" And there are two real short stories here--"A Hard Woman," "What Guillain-Barre Syndrome Means to Me"--which, though sketchy, indicate that Grayson can be a writer when he wants. For the most part, however: juvenile literary clowning, only faintly--and erratically--amusing.

They ignored our next book, out the following year, and returned to us with a brief notice on February 1, 1996:

Grayson, Richard
I SURVIVED CARACAS TRAFFIC:
Stories From the Me Decades
Avisson $24.95
3/15
ISBN:91888105046

An underground post-modernist who writes comic fiction crammed with details adopted from pop culture and the daily news. "With the Pope in Park Slope" chronicles the relationship between a retired pontiff and his Brooklyn roommate, and "Twelve-Step Barbie" evokes a middle-aged, post- success Barbie trying to make it through a spirit-deadening day. The long title story, a resonant meditation on the themes of relationships, AIDS, and mortality, proves him capable of less self-conscious, more serious (though not less comic) work.

Kirkus Discoveries also reviewed the following Dumbo Books publications:

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.


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.


WRITE-IN
Diary of a Congressional Candidate in Florida's Fourth Congressional District

Author: Grayson, Richard

Review Date: JANUARY 18, 2008
Publisher:Dumbo Books
Pages: 128
Price (paperback): $9.95
Publication Date: February 22, 2007
ISBN (paperback): 978-0-6151-4111-4
Category: AUTHORS
Classification: NONFICTION

A witty campaign diary by a wannabe Congressman far too clever to ever be elected.

In the spring of 2004, Grayson announced (mainly to himself) his bid to unseat the firmly entrenched Republican incumbent in Florida’s fourth Congressional district. Grayson’s long-shot run was made even longer by a number of factors: First, a South Floridian, Grayson had neither the time nor the money to travel to the Florida fourth, located on the Georgia border. Second, unable to afford the $9,000 filing fee, he could only run as a write-in candidate. Third, he was a gay, pro-choice, anti-war, anti-death-penalty liberal running for office in the state’s most conservative district. These insurmountable challenges—and the biting humor with which Grayson faced them—led one sympathetic journalist to call him “every seasoned politician’s worst fear: a verbose, unknown, unrestrained, write-in mock-challenger.” Grayson chronicled his efforts as a “mock-challenger” in a series of postings on McSweeney’s Internet Tendency website, and here he collects these postings in a slim, delectable volume. The author’s wry deadpan punctuates almost every entry, and his commentary is equal parts funny, sad and true. He benefits as much from his own droll intelligence as from the fact that American politics seem to have devolved into a theatre of the absurd; some of the best laughs come from Grayson’s merely transcribing passages from election questionnaires, publicity packets and political journalism that he encounters during his “campaign.” Nonetheless, the critique of election politics that his run represents is as hilarious as it is completely legitimate; gerrymandering and the incredible advantages of incumbency have resulted in a system where challengers for U.S. House seats—both “mock” and real—are defeated the vast majority of the time. And after reading this, one is left with the sinking feeling that even a thousand Graysons might never change this broken system.

Funny and devastatingly incisive.

The Written Nerd's Brooklyn Lit Life Interview with Richard Grayson: September 2007

Jessica Stockton-Bagnuto, the extraordinarily energetic and intelligent bookseller who back last winter won the $15,000 grand prize from the Brooklyn Public Library's fourth annual PowerUp! business-plan competition to open a Brooklyn bookstore, writes a perceptive and informative blog at The Written Nerd.

Today she announced there that, like much of the publishing industry and every Brooklyn psychiatrist and psychologist who's treated us, she's taking the month of August off. If you are at all interested in the future of book publishing and bookselling, take the time now to catch up on some of her posts.

About a year ago she was kind enough to honor us with an interview us for her feature Brooklyn Lit Life. You can check out what more distinguished writers said, but with The Written Nerd's kind permission, we'd like to reprint the interview here:

Richard Grayson is the real thing: born and raised in Brooklyn, he's equally at home in the old neighborhood and the hipster revival. His name may be new to you, but he's been writing fiction and nonfiction since the 1970s, and he often writes about current literary events in New York on his MySpace blog. I'm grateful that he followed up on our earlier email correspondence by writing about his memories of the bookstores of Brooklyn; his knowledge of the borough, and his love for it, is deep and wide.

Describe your particular literary project, and your role in it.

I’ve been writing stories since the early 1970s. They’ve been collected, rather haphazardly, into various books, but I never intended to write any books. My first three books, published in the late 1970s and early 1980s, were all the result of publishers contacting me, taking all the stories I sent them, and working them into collections. Later books were published pretty much the same way. I also write memoir and other nonfiction, from humor pieces to op-ed opinion pieces, and in 2004 McSweeney’s published my diary as a Florida congressional candidate on its website and I turned that into a book.

Why Brooklyn? What made you decide to live/work here, in both practical and emotional terms?

I was born here, in Brownsville, in 1951 and grew up in East Flatbush, Gravesend and then mostly in a neighborhood known variously as Flatlands, Old Mill Basin and Kings Plaza (after the mall opened a few blocks away in 1970). Most of the kids I went to public schools and Brooklyn College with couldn’t wait to escape the borough for someplace nicer.

I loved growing up here, in a place half urban, half suburban. Our house had a swimming pool, I started driving as soon as I could, yet – unlike most of the kids in my neighborhood – I adored going into “the city,” as we called it. But the future of the borough looked pretty grim in the 1970s, and by the 1980s I was living in Florida and spending most summers on the Upper West Side.

I’ve lived most of my life in Florida and other Sun Belt states and came back here last year. However, I did have brief sublets in the intervening years in Sheepshead Bay, Park Slope and Williamsburg and visited often, so I never really lost touch with Brooklyn.

Brooklyn’s my hometown. I think it’s greatly instructive to return to your hometown when you’re over 55.

Is there a Brooklyn sensibility or character? How would you describe it? How does it differ from the character of New York City as a whole?

I think it’s a kind of feistiness, perhaps engendered by a sense of inferiority to Manhattan. Everyone in the US and maybe the world had heard of Brooklyn. I grew up on all those World War II movies where there always seemed to be a Brooklyn guy in the platoon, with his funny accent and street-smart ways. Obviously that’s morphed a lot in the past half-century, but I think a version of it remains.

There’s also the sense of diversity that I grew up with, although neighborhoods were always quite distinct. I always enjoyed that and liked to travel on buses around Brooklyn outside my own neighborhood, which was very Italian and Jewish. As a kid, I was so nerdy that I liked to collect bus transfers from the different lines. Since I’ve been back, I’ve been continuing to ride the buses. A whole lot of non-brownstone Brooklyn exists that many newer and younger residents reading this probably rarely see.

I love living in Williamsburg, but when I was growing up and even in college, I felt sorry for people who had to live in what I thought was a run-down, decaying neighborhood. Some of my friends who did grow up around here don’t have such good memories and don’t enjoy coming back.

What about your particular neighborhood? Does it have its own unique character? This can include the kinds of people you tend to find there, particular characters or places that epitomize the neighborhood, etc.

I’m in Williamsburg now, pretty much at the center of things, with a short walk to everything the neighborhood has to offer. It’s exhilarating to live here. I like the energy, but to an old-time Brooklynite, a lot of what’s going on is pretty amusing.

I live in a house that belongs to friends I’ve known since forever, on a block I’ve come to for many years, and the older residents are the ones I relate to well – though I go to a lot of the readings and concerts and performances and art galleries and McCarren pool events where I see mostly younger people – I hate to use the term hipsters, but what are you going to do?

But I also feel comfortable all over Brooklyn because I know these neighborhoods well. Last week I was one of very few white people at an Anita Baker concert at Wingate Field in a neighborhood I grew up in. My great-grandparents owned a house a few blocks away, and innumerable other relatives were nearby. I feel I belong in Bensonhurst or Gowanus or the Heights or Canarsie or Kensington because I have personal history in all those places.

I was on my old block – East 56th Street between Avenue O and Fillmore – a few days ago, and the neighborhood seems even more idyllic than it used to be, a great place to grow up even if the subway was a 20-minute bus ride away. There was a moving van in front of the house next to door to ours, and I heard the family out front with their stuff speaking Creole. So I asked a teenage boy looking bored off to the side, “Sak pasé, are you moving in or out?” Out, he said, to Florida – where they can get a house twice as big for half the money. Just like my family when they moved to Florida in 1979. My parents had lived in Brooklyn all their lives.

What do you think of the direction Brooklyn, or at least your neighborhood, is going? What does the future look like in terms of economics, demographics, culture, and other changes?
Thirty years ago, when I was in my twenties, the long-range prediction was that Brooklyn would go the way of Buffalo, Detroit, and St. Louis. There were contrary voices that proved more prescient but the predominant mood was gloom over the decay and a nostalgia for the gloried past of the Dodgers, street stickball, eggcreams, etc.

I try to deal with the changes I’ve seen in some of my stories in And to Think That He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street, such as the title story which alternates between 2005 and the 1970s, or in quasi-memoirs like “The Lost Movie Theaters of Southeastern Brooklyn and Rockaway Beach,” that deal with some of the things that are gone (I’m writing something now about the old Norwegian neighborhood in Bay Ridge that’s mostly disappeared), and in current-day pieces like “Diary of a Brooklyn Cyclones Hot Dog.”

I always thought Brooklyn was a cool place, and I think it will continue to be a cool place. On the other hand, I’ve lived in other parts of the country, and Brooklyn is far from being the only cool place.

I suspect that a good portion of the future literature and art of Brooklyn won’t come from where you’d expect but from non-brownstone Brooklyn, with its immigrants from all over the world. The diversity is breathtaking when I ride the bus down Coney Island Avenue or Third Avenue or Church Avenue.

Two kinds of immigration that saved Brooklyn: the obvious one I just mentioned –fostered after House Judiciary Committee Chairman Emanuel Celler, who represented Brooklyn in Congress for fifty years, got the landmark 1965 immigration bill passed – and the migration of the artistic and professional classes into neighborhoods that started becoming trendy as early as the late 1970s right in the midst of the general decay.

Is there a Brooklyn literary sensibility? Which writers or works most emblematize Brooklyn for you? Which older writers set the tone? Which contemporary writers are you reading with interest?

Growing up, I loved books about other kids in Brooklyn: first and foremost, Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and then Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep, Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones, Irving Shulman’s The Amboy Dukes and later Chaim Potok’s The Chosen and Jay Neugeboren’s An Orphan’s Tale.

Other great older Brooklyn books are Daniel Fuchs’ Williamsburg Trilogy, Wallace Markfield’s hilarious To an Early Grave (later turned into the film Bye Bye Braverman), Alfred Kazin’s A Walker in the City, Michael Stephens’ >Brooklyn Book of the Dead, Jack Pulaski’s The St. Veronica Gig Stories (a terrific Williamsburg book), Hubert Selby Jr.’s Last Exit to Brooklyn, Pietro di Donato’s Christ in Concrete and Bernard Malamud’s The Assistant.

Fiction writers whose works emblemize Brooklyn for me also include Irwin Shaw, Norman Mailer, Woody Allen (whose photo I used to pass every day changing classes at Midwood), Gilbert Sorrentino, James Purdy, Paula Fox, Pete Hamill, Gloria Naylor, Jonathan Baumbach, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, Jane Schwartz, Thomas Glynn, Jacqueline Woodson, Gerald Green, Thomas Boyle, Edwidge Danticat, and Robert Greenfield.

In poetry, Marianne Moore and later Harvey Shapiro, Robert Hershon and Martin Espada. In drama, Arthur Miller, whose mother used to play cards with my great-grandmother, as well as Donald Margulies.

The best recent Brooklyn writing for me has come from Jonathan Lethem and Paul Auster. Touré told me about a novel he’s working on that sounds wonderful.

Why do you think Brooklyn has such a dense population of writers? Is there something particularly literary about Brooklyn? Where and how do people read here?

I got an incredible literary education at J.H.S. 285 in East Flatbush, at Midwood High School, and then at Brooklyn College, where I studied with writers who themselves had grown up in Brooklyn. Despite coming from a working class background where the only college graduates I knew were my teachers and my doctors, since I was very little I assumed living in Brooklyn meant I could become a writer.

In my story “Branch Libraries of Southeastern Brooklyn,” I explore my love for the libraries here. But there were also numerous places to buy books in Brooklyn in the old days, when all bookstores were independent bookstores. The one I liked best was a tiny store, The Book Worm, on Flatbush Avenue off Church, a couple of stores down from the Dutch Reformed Church and across from Erasmus Hall High School and the Astor Theatre, which played foreign and “art” movies. I’d go into The Book Worm with a twenty-dollar bill that my father or grandfather had given me and buy loads of Bantam and Signet paperbacks for a quarter or 35 cents each – later they got more expensive, of course, but still relatively cheap. I can recall buying The Crying of Lot 49 there, and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater and Franny and Zooey and Manhattan Transfer.

But it seemed every neighborhood at least the next best thing: the stationery stores, family-owned drug stores and little holes-in-the-wall that sold cheap mass market paperbacks, including the “classics” lines with everything from Greek drama and Shakespeare to Mark Twain and James Joyce, along with the latest bestsellers (and yes, I read a lot of wonderful crap, too).

There was the My Friends Bookstore that also had used comics on Clarendon Road east of Flatbush Avenue and a store whose name I can’t remember on Kings Highway around East 18th Street owned by two young lesbians who introduced me to writers like Rita Mae Brown and Colette and Jean Rhys. Not far away, just off Kings Highway on Coney Island Avenue, there was a little used bookstore run by the mother of a Brooklyn College classmate that had some odd and interesting volumes. And Sandy Tischoff’s Mostly Books on Cortelyou Road was like a country store gossip exchange for Flatbush that lasted until the 1990s.

Earlier, first-class book departments existed in the department stores like Macy’s on Flatbush Avenue and at E.J. Korvette and Abraham & Straus on Fulton Street, where I worked in my uncle’s slacks store in my early teens, and where I’d spend my money during lunch hours. There were also a couple of musty Fourth Avenue-style used bookstores one block south of Fulton on Livingston Street and another one on Montague Street in the Heights and on Utica Avenue near Carroll Street in Crown Heights that also had comics (I remember buying the first issue of Green Lantern there). A candy store every few blocks on Avenue N and many other avenues sold the comic books I was crazy about.

The Barrons and Barchas bookstores on Hillel Place sold not only college textbooks but also some great literary books when trade paperbacks started becoming the norm.
And there were the really good Community Bookstores in Brooklyn Heights and Park Slope, where a few stores down on Seventh Avenue there was also the Second Story Bookstore whose yellow steps said something like “Don’t be lazy, books are waiting for you upstairs.”

But by the time I started Brooklyn College in 1969 and taught at LIU downtown in 1975, most of the venues that sold good books had closed. In 1970 when Kings Plaza opened, Waldenbooks – the big shopping mall chain -- had a store there. It wasn’t great, but it was three blocks from my house, and they did take a lot of copies of my first book of mostly Brooklyn stories, With Hitler in New York, when it came out in 1979.

However, by then I pretty much went to Manhattan for books: Eighth Street, Gotham, Shakespeare & Company, Soho Books, Doubleday, B. Dalton, Books & Company, St. Marks, Coliseum and the rest, including a bunch of literary bookstores whose names I’ve forgotten and which are long gone.

I’m glad to see we have some new and wonderful bookstores in Brooklyn again.


What events, series, readings, happenings, places, stores, publications, movements, etc. seem to you currently interesting or important in the Brooklyn literary world?

I’m no expert on today’s scene, but I’d say the Brooklyn Book Fair, Fort Greene Summer Literary Festival, and the many reading series at a number of venues around the borough, in bars and bookstores and other places, such as at the Stain Bar, Unnameable Books and the Old Stone House. Also there are excellent literary events at the public library, at Brooklyn College (where the MFA program is now one of the best in the country), and at less-heralded venues like Medgar Evers College.

826NYC in the Slope is doing amazing things for kids. There are great organizations and publications located in Brooklyn. The borough president’s office has been very helpful, and I don’t say that just because I’ve known Marty Markowitz since his graduate student government days at BC in the early 1970s.