Richard Grayson E-Books Now Available for Under $1 at Google E-Bookstore and Indie Stores like Changing Hands, Powell's, WORD and Greenlight Bookstore

With the launch today of Google's E-Bookstore, many titles of books by Richard Grayson are now available as Google eBooks for 95 cents each. We are working at getting other titles online as soon as possible.

You will soon also be able to buy Google eBooks by Richard Grayson at some of our favorite indie bookstores like Tempe's Changing Hands Bookstore, Fort Greene's Greenlight Bookstore, Greenpoint's WORD and Portland's Powell's Books.

Other favorite indie bookstores we've loved over the years that will be selling our Google eBooks are Books & Books in Coral Gables and Miami Beach, Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle, Skylight Books in L.A., The Garden District Book Shop in New Orleans, and Kepler's in Menlo Park.

Monday Night in Fort Greene: Ghita Schwarz and "Displaced Persons" at Greenlight Bookstore

Tonight we went over to the absolutely fabulous Greenlight Bookstore in Fort Greene, right by the Fulton Street stop of the G train running along Lafayette Avenue (and the Lafayette Avenue stop of the C train running along Fulton Street - but only MTA employees can go between these stations).

We came for a reading by Ghita Schwarz, a neighborhood resident and author of a first novel, Displaced Persons, which has been garnering wonderful reviews and which we can't wait to read.

Ghita is well-known as a civil rights litigator specializing in immigrants' rights, but she's been writing for decades, from her undergraduate work in The Harvard Crimson to more recent articles everywhere from The Believer to The San Francisco Bay Guardian. We were alrady impressed with the great reviews of Displaced Persons and Ghita's interview with Leonard Lopate on WNYC.

She read two passages from her novel. The first took place in the displaced persons' camp in Europe where her three major characters - Pavel, Fela and Chaim - form a makeshift family. The second, longer, excerpt took place in the 80s or 90s, as they and their families and their fellow survivors debate the now-public nature of the horrors they experienced: whether to go along with "Shpielberg"'s Holocaust oral history project, how and whether to compare their suffering with that of the victims of the Atlantic slave trade and their descendants, and how to make sense of their lives.

The author clearly has a gift for characterization, for inner dialogue as well as the conversational speech of the people she writes about. The long question-and-answer period at Greenlight brought out many interesting testimonies from other children of survivors.

We grew up in a very Jewish world in Brooklyn in the 1950s and 1960s, but except for The Diary of Anne Frank, we knew very little about the Holocaust; it wasn't talked about by the few people (a couple of neighbors or parents of friends) who experienced it, and nothing much was said about it even in four years of Hebrew school at Flatbush Park Jewish Center.

As far as we knew, no one even vaguely related to us had anything to do with it, so it was fairly removed from our lives until the 1970s when the world seemed suddenly filled with books, TV shows, discussions and films about the subject. Anyway, now we are excited about Ghita Schwarz's novel, and like many others - the book's a bestseller already - we look forward to reading it.

Any author who says, as Ghita did in an interview with The Brooklyn Paper, "I love living in Brooklyn, period. I just love biking and walking around. I’m very happy living here, and for me it’s easier to write when I’m happy," knows what she's talking about.

Thursday Night in Fort Greene: Nelson George Talks with Touré at Greenlight Bookstore

Tonight we had the privilege of being a witness to a free-wheeling 80-minute conversation between two of our favorite Brooklyn writers, Nelson George and Touré, at the wonderful Greenlight Bookstore in Fort Greene, the neighborhood they've both been a big part of for decades.

It was like eavesdropping on these two highly intelligent and insightful friends who seem to know everyone you'd like to know, except that they also answered the eavesdroppers' questions. When it was over, Nelson George signed copies of his book for lots of people.

The evening focused on George's career, timed for the paperback release of City Kid: A Writer's Memoir of Ghetto Life and Post-Soul Success, which we read and loved shortly after seeing the author at the Hue-Man Bookstore in Harlem a year ago. (Our 83-year-old dad, who grew up in Brownsville thirty years before Nelson George did and went to the same high school -- we went to the same junior high, J.H.S. 285 -- also loved the book, which we've told our BMCC creative writing students, especially the ones who live in Brownsville, to get.)

The large audience -- as you can tell from the angle of our pics, we happily stood off to the side along with a lot of other people -- seemed totally fascinated and involved in the discussion. We wish it had been taped so that people who weren't there tonight could hear Nelson George and Touré had to say about the neighborhood, friendship, music, writing, and lots more.

Nelson George began the reading by reading an early excerpt from City Kid, but most of the evening was a genuine conversation.

Among the many subjects discussed were mentoring among black writers, then and now; Fort Greene in what may have been its heyday and its post-Nets/Atlantic Yards future; various musical performers (takes on everyone from Timbalake and Miles Davis to Janelle Monáe, Sylvester and even Toto); whether hip-hop innovation has stalled; where music journalism is heading; Nelson George's long friendships with icons like Spike Lee and Chris Rock; and his varied, always interesting past and coming projects, like Left Unsaid, a web-based series about a Sunday brunch among Brooklyn women; a book on Michael Jackson's Thriller

(the only time these easygoing friends had a serious disagreement was over MJ's best album; Touré said Off the Wall, Nelson said Bad); working with Chris Rock on Good Hair; etc. We got to hear gossip, insight, funny moments, obscure info and speculation, all fascinating. You should have been there.