Dumbo Books of Brooklyn: Rockland Center for the Arts

This week Superstition Mountain Press published Richard Grayson's Eighties' End: Autumn. It is available in a 298-page trade paperback edition for $15.99, as well as an e-book published by Art Pants Company available at the Amazon Kindle store for 99 cents.

The promo stuff says in part,

Richard Grayson has been keeping a daily diary compulsively since the summer of 1969, when he was an 18-year-old agoraphobic about to venture out into the world -- or at least the world around him in Brooklyn.

Earlier, Grayson 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.

In EIGHTIES' END: AUTUMN, Grayson alternates his fall diary entries from 1987, 1988 and 1989, when he is variously spending time with other writers, artists and musicians at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire; living on the Upper West Side and serving as a writer-in-residence at the suburban Rockland Center of the Arts under one of the state arts grants he has at the time; with his emotionally troubled grandmother at the beach in Rockaway; and in Florida, training Miami schoolteachers on the use of computers and teaching writing classes at Broward Community College.

Grayson is juggling a massive credit card chassis, putting out two new books of short stories, and embarking on a strict diet to lose forty pounds. He's also getting himself into the newspapers as a social activist, demonstrating on Wall Street against leveraged buyouts and at Florida shopping centers against a Halloween mask denigrating to Arabs.

EIGHTIES' END: AUTUMN is the final volume of THE EIGHTIES DIARIES, whose other books include SOUTH FLORIDA WINTERS, LATE SPRING IN SUNRISE, WEST SIDE SUMMERS, INDIAN SUMMER: PARK SLOPE, and SPRINGTIME IN LAUDERHILL.