East Flatbush University Press publishes Joseph Conrad's THE NICE GUY OF THE "NARCISSUS" in print edition and as ebook available at Amazon Kindle

East Flatbush University Press is proud to announce the simultaneous publication as a print edition and as an ebook at the Amazon Kindle Store a classroom-friendly version of Joseph Conrad's classic novella THE NICE GUY OF THE "NARCISSUS." The Kindle ebook is available for 99 cents.

Edited by Richard Grayson, who previously produced the acclaimed THE HIPSTER HUCKLEBERRY FINN by Mark Twain and THE FASHIONISTA MERCHANT OF VENICE by William Shakespeare, this new book is yet another revised and updated text of a venerable work of literature, only without offensive racial and religious slurs.

As the description for the $9.99 print version notes,

At one time, this brilliant novella was one of Joseph Conrad's most frequently read books. However, due to its unfortunate title, it has been unfairly shunned in classrooms for decades. Now, thanks to editor Richard Grayson and East Flatbush University Press, we have a new, non-offensive edition of Conrad's thought-provoking "tale of the sea" that is totally student-friendly. Every instance of the N-word has been scrubbed from the text and replaced with "nice guy" - which is just what West Indian sailor James Wait really is. A classic work of literature is now available for a new generation!

Joseph Conrad's THE NICE GUY OF THE "NARCISSUS" is also available as a free download at Lulu.

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."

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.

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."

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.