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.

Pete Lit reviews Richard Grayson's HIGHLY IRREGULAR STORIES

Thanks to Pete Anderson for reviewing Richard Grayson's Highly Irregular Stories on his blog, Pete Lit. An excerpt:

Highly Irregular Stories. . .is a collection of four chapbooks from early in [Grayson's] career which show a young writer who was fearless in experimenting with form while never forgetting about storytelling. Much of the book is metafictional, with many stories cleverly being about the stories themselves. (And one story, "Narcissism and Me", even has the story's reader be its narrator – I can’t really explain it, so you’ll just have to read it.) His stories are funny, minimalist, and sometimes fantastical in nature. . .

The "Eating at Arby's" chapbook hilariously relates the primitive, childlike conversations (described by one reviewer as “equidistant between Hemingway's short stories and Dick and Jane”) of Zelda and Manny, an old Jewish married couple who relentlessly praise their South Florida home, their sunny dispositions desperately but never quite disguising many dark undercurrents - suffocating heat, racial tension, drug trafficking, murder - to life in the Sunshine State. "I Saw Mommy Kissing Citicorp" is a rollicking, episodic satire on corporate and government life, set in an absurd Manhattan where the chairman of the Federal Reserve faces down a balky ATM, his mother frets over him at their Trump Tower apartment while repeatedly watching an old videotape of her deceased husband, and the Comptroller of the Currency on a flight from LaGuardia struggles to figure out how he'll explain to his wife how the bag of bagels he brought home to D.C. for her is now half-empty, without bringing up the touchy subject of the cute teenage girl in the next seat who spent their flight obliviously enjoying both his attention and his bagel-generosity.

The strongest story of all is "My Twelfth Twelfth Story Story", in which the narrator tells of writing the twelfth and final story of his collection, all of which involve characters who live on various twelfth stories. The writer is a widower who is raising a young daughter, and struggles to write and earn a living while also being a good father as the girl lives in a fantasy world to avoid the reality and pain of the loss of her mother. [Grayson] he perfectly captures the joys and fears of every parent as well as the inner life of a young girl, showing a remarkable bit of empathy in doing so.

Highly Irregular Stories is another fine collection of stories from one very prolific and inventive author.

The book was also reviewed in August 2007 by Marie Mundaca at the Hipster Book Club. Excerpts:

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. Grayson revels in finding stories in ephemera—descriptions of what happened to groups of people on dates throughout a year, a list of traits, stories about writing stories.

The stories in Highly Irregular Stories were originally published in the 1970s and 1980s, but 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—he'll describe a story he wrote, or wants to write, or is in the process of writing. The trick with this genre is to make sure the reader can find the story. There is a narrative somewhere; It's not all jokes and lists. Grayson succeeds here—the lists and diary entries reveal his passion for finding new ways to tell a story. "The Facts Are Always Friendly" is a series of calendar entries that explore the complicated relationships among a group of friends who are at once affable and duplicitous. "My Twelfth Twelfth Story Story," a tale about a seemingly upright citizen writing a book of stories about living on the 12 floor, reveals that the protagonist has a preoccupation with gruesome murders. "Progress" is a tale of a young man who goes home with a very friendly clothing salesman and ends up alone, trapped in the salesman's circular apartment, afraid to leave.

The funny stuff in Highly Irregular Stories is not just mildly amusing but actually laugh-out-loud funny. Take these lines, from "A Disjointed Fiction":

My eye catches an unauthorized advertisement scrawled on the subway map across from my seat:
FOR A GOOD LAY CALL 969-9970
It's bad enough that this is my sister's phone number, but what really hurts is that the handwriting is unmistakably my father's.

"Eating at Arby's" humorously explores the lives of two Southern Florida residents, Manny and Zelda, through a series of Dick and Jane-style stories. For Manny and Zelda, a trip to a mall becomes an analysis of the wastefulness of the middle classes, a visit to the chiropractor, and an examination of race relations. What sometimes seem like stand-up routines on the outset reveal stories about the deep struggles of creativity and identity in the late twentieth century.

In the story "Innovations," Grayson takes revenge on a more successful writer by making him a character in a story and leaving him trapped in Miami Beach during the 1950s, specifically because the successful writer called Miami Beach America's armpit. However, "Innovations" is not about the successful writer, identified as D.L., being trapped in Miami. Rather, it is about some of the things he does that seem to annoy Grayson's character and how these annoyances lead to Grayson's character trapping him in Miami. "Innovations" is very typical of the tales in Highly Irregular Stories—there are stories within stories within stories that spiral inward or spiral outward towards their conclusions.

There is nothing lazy or superfluous in Grayson's prose. Every word is called into service. What seem like digressions are insights into the story or the characters. For example, Grayson starts "The Governor of the State of Depression" by writing, "The Governor likes to be treated like a baby… He has taken to eating baby food. His especial favorite is Gerber's Strained Vanilla Custard Pudding." The pudding is not only pudding, it's custard, and it's strained. It's practically pre-digested. Later, when the Governor is reading an editorial condemning his policies, he's eating the pudding in an obvious attempt to comfort himself.

Sometimes Grayson's self-effacing humor seems almost Vonnegut-esque, as in "Escape from the Planet of the Humans," where he writes,

If I were to write wonderful books and grow old gracefully and become a member of the Literature Panel of the National Endowment for the Arts, the headline on page 11 of The New York Post might read WRITER HONORED AT FORUM, but I doubt it.

For all the similarities to more mainstream writers, Grayson is firmly seated in the experimental realm and is much closer to writers like Donald Barthelme, Raymond Federman and Steve Katz. Readers in search of realistic plots and characters will not find what they're looking for here, but for the more adventurous reader who enjoys satirical and experimental fiction, Highly Irregular Stories is highly recommended.

The book also was reviewed by Kirkus Discoveries in July 2006:

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.

The book was also reviewed by Ken Davis at Bookgasm in August 2006. An excerpt:

With HIGHLY IRREGULAR STORIES, I can’t think of adjectives that more accurately describe this collection of Richard Grayson’s writings than the first two of his title, although unorthodox, quirky, peculiar and highly entertaining also come to mind.

This book is purportedly an accumulation of stories originally published in the 1970s and ’80s in four separate chapbooks (DISJOINTED FICTIONS, EATING AT ARBY’S, THE GREATEST SHORT STORY THAT ABSOLUTELY EVER WAS and NARCISSISM AND ME), all long been out of print. I wouldn’t exactly describe the contents as stories, at least in the traditional sense anyway. Many of them might be better described as vignettes or sometimes as just snippets of a fictional conversation. Heck, “Some Sad News” is a mere 180 words. By comparison, this review is roughly 450. I didn’t find any exquisite plots or character development, but I was too busy enjoying myself to care.

Grayson is a literary performance artist. His words are avant-garde and so uniquely different than anything else I’ve ever read., as the book is chock full of the offbeat. Take the narrator in the 147-word “Ordinary Peepholes,” who spies the scrawled message on a subway “FOR A GOOD LAY CALL 969-9970.” He recognizes the phone number as his sister’s and the handwriting as his father’s. Or how about the very subtle but delicious irony in “I Saw Mommy Kissing Citicorp,” in which the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board who oversees the ebb and flow of cash in this nation has trouble with an ATM and can’t withdraw $200.

The entries from EATING AT ARBY’S were by far the most entertaining, written in the style of the old Dick and Jane readers, but updated to feature the liberal thinkers Manny and Zelda. These two don’t discuss how fast Spot can run, opting instead for more adult subject matter. For example, in “Strange Experience,” Zelda comes home and announces, “Look what I have got, Manny. I have some cocaine.” Manny replies, “So that white powder is cocaine. I have heard a lot about it from many people.”

Manny and Zelda are taken to a gun range by their friend José in “Fun with a Gun.” Zelda warms to the idea of firearms and says, “Manny, I want to shoot that gun. That gun will become our friend, just like José is our friend.” The topics of murder, homosexuality and outrageous electric bills also are tackled by the pair. Sasson Jeans and the Arby’s salad bar at Arby’s also make hilarious repeat appearances.

I highly recommend this book and reading in general. So do Manny and Zelda. In “Shopping in the Mall,” Zelda says, “I read a book once. It made me think.” Manny replies “Thinking is fun. I like to think.”

If you like to think, too, you can get a copy of Highly Irregular Stories from Dumbo Books.

Hipster Book Club Reviews HIGHLY IRREGULAR STORIES by Richard Grayson

Marie Mundaca has reviewed Highly Irregular Stories at the Hipster Book Club:

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. Grayson revels in finding stories in ephemera—descriptions of what happened to groups of people on dates throughout a year, a list of traits, stories about writing stories.

The stories in Highly Irregular Stories were originally published in the 1970s and 1980s, but 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—he'll describe a story he wrote, or wants to write, or is in the process of writing. The trick with this genre is to make sure the reader can find the story. There is a narrative somewhere; It's not all jokes and lists. Grayson succeeds here—the lists and diary entries reveal his passion for finding new ways to tell a story. "The Facts Are Always Friendly" is a series of calendar entries that explore the complicated relationships among a group of friends who are at once affable and duplicitous. "My Twelfth Twelfth Story Story," a tale about a seemingly upright citizen writing a book of stories about living on the 12 floor, reveals that the protagonist has a preoccupation with gruesome murders. "Progress" is a tale of a young man who goes home with a very friendly clothing salesman and ends up alone, trapped in the salesman's circular apartment, afraid to leave.

The funny stuff in Highly Irregular Stories is not just mildly amusing but actually laugh-out-loud funny. Take these lines, from "A Disjointed Fiction":

My eye catches an unauthorized advertisement scrawled on the subway map across from my seat:
FOR A GOOD LAY CALL 969-9970
It's bad enough that this is my sister's phone number, but what really hurts is that the handwriting is unmistakably my father's.

"Eating at Arby's" humorously explores the lives of two Southern Florida residents, Manny and Zelda, through a series of Dick and Jane-style stories. For Manny and Zelda, a trip to a mall becomes an analysis of the wastefulness of the middle classes, a visit to the chiropractor, and an examination of race relations. What sometimes seem like stand-up routines on the outset reveal stories about the deep struggles of creativity and identity in the late twentieth century.

In the story "Innovations," Grayson takes revenge on a more successful writer by making him a character in a story and leaving him trapped in Miami Beach during the 1950s, specifically because the successful writer called Miami Beach America's armpit. However, "Innovations" is not about the successful writer, identified as D.L., being trapped in Miami. Rather, it is about some of the things he does that seem to annoy Grayson's character and how these annoyances lead to Grayson's character trapping him in Miami. "Innovations" is very typical of the tales in Highly Irregular Stories — there are stories within stories within stories that spiral inward or spiral outward towards their conclusions.

There is nothing lazy or superfluous in Grayson's prose. Every word is called into service. What seem like digressions are insights into the story or the characters. For example, Grayson starts "The Governor of the State of Depression" by writing, "The Governor likes to be treated like a baby. . . He has taken to eating baby food. His especial favorite is Gerber's Strained Vanilla Custard Pudding." The pudding is not only pudding, it's custard, and it's strained. It's practically pre-digested. Later, when the Governor is reading an editorial condemning his policies, he's eating the pudding in an obvious attempt to comfort himself.

Sometimes Grayson's self-effacing humor seems almost Vonnegut-esque, as in "Escape from the Planet of the Humans," where he writes,

If I were to write wonderful books and grow old gracefully and become a member of the Literature Panel of the National Endowment for the Arts, the headline on page 11 of The New York Post might read WRITER HONORED AT FORUM, but I doubt it.

For all the similarities to more mainstream writers, Grayson is firmly seated in the experimental realm and is much closer to writers like Donald Barthelme, Raymond Federman and Steve Katz. Readers in search of realistic plots and characters will not find what they're looking for here, but for the more adventurous reader who enjoys satirical and experimental fiction, Highly Irregular Stories is highly recommended.

(August 2007)

The Outsiders' Book Review from Underground Literary Alliance Reviews HIGHLY IRREGULAR STORIES & AND TO THINK THAT HE KISSED HIM ON LORIMER STREET

The prolific author Jack Saunders reviews Richard Grayson's two Dumbo Books short story collections for the Underground Literary Alliance's Outsider Writers' Book Review:

Richard Grayson: Highly Irregular Stories; And To Think that He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street and Other Stories
Reviewed by: Jack Saunders

Jack Saunders has met Richard Grayson, and Richard has met Jack.


Highly Irregular Stories (2006) and And to Think That He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street and Other Stories (2006), by Richard Grayson. Dumbo Books of Brooklyn, 72 Conselyea St., Brooklyn, NY 11211-2211. dumbobooks@yahoo.com

And to Think That He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street and Other Stories is Richard Grayson’s 10th volume of fiction. Or metafiction. Or autobiography. Or stand-up comedy. Or short form narrative. He’s published two other books. What are they? Nonfiction? Reportage? I always think of Jonathan Winters saying he is in gar-bahj, when I hear re-por-tahj.

I believe you could call the writing avant-garde. It’s out ahead of the pack. The avant-garde is a tradition, like any other. Like commercial fiction, or literary fiction. It’s anti-commercial. Anti-literary. The literary is a set of conventions an iconoclast wants to bust up.

An iconoclast is aware of his place in the scheme of things. He knows the history of what he’s doing. He is aware, or self-aware, and self-awareness leads to irony.

Irony lends itself to short pieces. You don’t want to be long-winded. That’s for novels, a more expansive form, where you can stretch out. In one sense, you could say the avant-garde leads the way. In another, profounder sense, you could say it doesn’t go anywhere, it just is. It is what it is. Take it or leave it. As it is. This makes reviewing a collection of short pieces either very easy or very hard.

What is the author trying to do, and is he succeeding, on his own terms? Larry wrote the other day that he found himself at looking at books in a rummage sale, and found he was reading them to see what bias they had; not to see what the book was about or to read for enjoyment or to get taken up by it.

What happens when we approach books like that? How do we not approach books like that?

Do collections of stories become something in the aggregate they were not, separately, as lone stories, in magazines that pay in copies and go belly up, or self-published chapbooks, issued in editions of hundreds of copies? Are they clever, amusing, cute? Do they hold up? Do we see a design to the works, over time? A pattern? Is a collection of them more impressive, more authentic, does it have a gravitas scattered fragments cannot demonstrate? Are we impressed? Are we surprised? Did we disremember? Do we see things we didn’t see the first time through?

You can buy the books from lulu.com for $12.95 or $16.95. Highly Irregular Stories is a collection of four chapbooks, which are out of print, and rare. A copy of Eating at Arby’s was recently listed online at $350. It’s good to see the stuff back in print. The stories in And to Think That He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street haven’t been collected before. It’s nice to see them in one spot.

What is One Life in the Short Form Narrative Business like? We get a good feel for it, in these two collections, which span three decades.

What is America like? It’s like Richard Grayson says it is, it’s how Richard Grayson sees it. He’s a Jew from Brooklyn, I’m a cracker from Delray Beach. We have different accents, different life-experiences, different expectations, about life. I’m older than he is, and was in the Air Force for eight years. I boxed. I went ten rounds with Bukowski. I fought the Creature from the Black Lagoon underwater, at Wakulla Springs.

Now I just sit around and watch my boot turn blue, from mildew.

But his America rings true, to me, a deep and eclectic literary sensibility in a pop-culture milieu of glitz and flash, the shallow and the hyped, pinball-machine moths, attracted to the light, the noise, the buzz. Love-bugs, smashed on the windscreen. In the throes of their mating ritual. Up around Gainesville on a two-lane blacktop. Harry Crews afraid to leave his writing studio because he might miss something. And Harry Crews ain’t afraid of death or taxes.

A reader said he kept my books on the back of the crapper, and he started every day with a good old country shit and a belly laugh.

That’s a good thing to do with Richard Grayson’s books. Keep them on the back of the crapper and read them every day. They will make you laugh. The stories are short enough you can read one at a sitting.

My theory is that we are attracted to a writer’s voice, and every time we find a writer we like, we buy everything by him or about him we can find, regardless of genre. If he’s any good, he has invented his own genre, conflated one or more genres into a form of his own, which we recognize, because of his distinctive voice.

Bud Powell had small hands. Mary Lou Williams had hands that looked like $10 worth of spareribs in 1937. They’re not going to sound the same. Why should they? If the short pieces have a unity of form, a consistency of vision, a continuity of effort, a tone, an outlook, when do they begin to be less self-contained short pieces and constituent parts of a longer work composed of short pieces, if they do? If they do, was it an accident?

Public taste is fickle. A writing career is a tradeoff and a crapshoot. You can make a fortune writing but not a living. Not even the living you’d make at more mundane tasks. You have to have a sense of humor about it.

A sense of black humor, like the old comics Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, and Shelley Berman. The writers Woody Allen, Richard Brautigan, and Terry Southern. Would you choose writing for a career? You don’t choose it, it chooses you. What if you choose it and it doesn’t choose you?

Can you be funny about that? For 30 years? It’s not as easy as Richard Grayson makes it look.

The stories in the second book are newer and darker than the stories in the first book. Branch libraries are closed, movie houses shut down, neighborhoods gentrified, people moved away, friends died, what was not there, then was new, and ugly, is now shabby, with people hanging on, because they have no choice. There are constants. The stock market rises and falls, real estate goes up, people have careers, careers have an arc, not all careers have the same arc.

Richard Grayson once observed to me that writers advise you to do what they did. If they teach writing, they advise you to teach writing. If they are some other kind of professional, they advise you to be some other kind of professional. He was a lawyer. Journalists advise people to write for newspapers or magazines. Or television. I was a paraprofessional. A technical writer. Not an engineer or a programmer. On a par with a draftsman or a logistician (supply specialist). A white collar job, but not a full-fledged profession.

What is true is you need a job that pays enough so you can live comfortably, and are not so tired by your work that you are too tired to write, after work. And that can mean too tired emotionally. Then you just do your job and write before and after work. Or during work.

Maybe you’ll have a year off now and then, when you win a grant, inherit some money, or, in my case, once, are able to draw 49 weeks of separation pay, unemployment, and extended unemployment benefits, plus social security, or, another time, cash in the retirement you rolled over into an annuity when your last corporate employer laid you off and live on that for a year. Or mortgage the house you inherited when your grandfather died and run up the balance on a line-of-credit home-equity loan.

I’m always curious about how a writer supported himself when he wrote the books, and think that should go in the books. I think a reader has a right to know that.

Did he kiss a Stalinist’s ass in Macy’s window?

I enjoyed reading these books and I think you will too. I think they’re worth going to some trouble to find out about and buy. And tell your friends about.

And tell the author about them, if you liked them.

Blogcritics.org Reviews HIGHLY IRREGULAR STORIES by Richard Grayson

On September 16, 2006, Nancy Gail reviewed Highly Irregular Stories for Blogcritics.org:

Highly Irregular Stories is an anthology of four Richard Grayson chapbooks. Although not for every taste, selections are intriguing enough to keep the reader turning pages until the end.

"Inside Barbara Walters" examines what might have happened if a young girl had not had a flash of inspiration when it came time for show-and-tell in second grade. Having left her stamp collection at home, young Barbara reached into her backpack and grabbed her Curious George book. After that, all she had to do was mention her interest in reading and the day was saved.

"Progress" takes the relationship between a young man and a stranger and brings it full circle. Ricky is prevented from buying the wrong shirt in Bloomingdale's and ends up going home with Eric Cornell. While Eric fixes dinner for the two of them, he suddenly remembers a neighborhood association meeting he must attend. For some reason, he has gotten himself named in charge of the tree parent committee. Ricky is left at Eric's place to fend for himself. When Ricky calls a pharmacy for a sleep aid, a young teenager named Rico delivers it.

"17 Fragments in Search of a Story" is exactly what the title implies. An author talks about himself and the book he is trying to write in 17 parts. While there is a natural flow to the sections, the ending is not one readers are going to forget.

"Eating at Arby's" was the longest selection and the one I liked least. A retired couple moves to Florida (where else?) and discovers life is not quite what they imagined. In a bizarre move, Grayson takes their day-to-day banter and turns it into an irritating form of repetition. It makes the two main characters sound like idiots. However, I found the reference of wanting to take a trip to Columbia amusing.

"The Governor of the State of Depression" looks into the life of a politician and shows the glamour of a life in public office is not always what people think.

Grayson is hardly a typical author. He takes real life issues in society and uses them freely in every story he writes. With the varied selection, readers will find at minimum one thing they like even if they consider the rest to be junk.

Bookgasm Reviews HIGHLY IRREGULAR STORIES by Richard Grayson

Ken Davis has reviewed Highly Irregular Stories at Bookgasm:

With HIGHLY IRREGULAR STORIES, I can’t think of adjectives that more accurately describe this collection of Richard Grayson’s writings than the first two of his title, although unorthodox, quirky, peculiar and highly entertaining also come to mind.

This book is purportedly an accumulation of stories originally published in the 1970s and ’80s in four separate chapbooks (DISJOINTED FICTIONS, EATING AT ARBY’S, THE GREATEST SHORT STORY THAT ABSOLUTELY EVER WAS and NARCISSISM AND ME), all long been out of print. I wouldn’t exactly describe the contents as stories, at least in the traditional sense anyway. Many of them might be better described as vignettes or sometimes as just snippets of a fictional conversation. Heck, “Some Sad News” is a mere 180 words. By comparison, this review is roughly 450. I didn’t find any exquisite plots or character development, but I was too busy enjoying myself to care.

Grayson is a literary performance artist. His words are avant-garde and so uniquely different than anything else I’ve ever read., as the book is chock full of the offbeat. Take the narrator in the 147-word “Ordinary Peepholes,” who spies the scrawled message on a subway “FOR A GOOD LAY CALL 969-9970.” He recognizes the phone number as his sister’s and the handwriting as his father’s. Or how about the very subtle but delicious irony in “I Saw Mommy Kissing Citicorp,” in which the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board who oversees the ebb and flow of cash in this nation has trouble with an ATM and can’t withdraw $200.

The entries from EATING AT ARBY’S were by far the most entertaining, written in the style of the old Dick and Jane readers, but updated to feature the liberal thinkers Manny and Zelda. These two don’t discuss how fast Spot can run, opting instead for more adult subject matter. For example, in “Strange Experience,” Zelda comes home and announces, “Look what I have got, Manny. I have some cocaine.” Manny replies, “So that white powder is cocaine. I have heard a lot about it from many people.”

Manny and Zelda are taken to a gun range by their friend José in “Fun with a Gun.” Zelda warms to the idea of firearms and says, “Manny, I want to shoot that gun. That gun will become our friend, just like José is our friend.” The topics of murder, homosexuality and outrageous electric bills also are tackled by the pair. Sasson Jeans and the Arby’s salad bar at Arby’s also make hilarious repeat appearances.

I highly recommend this book and reading in general. So do Manny and Zelda. In “Shopping in the Mall,” Zelda says, “I read a book once. It made me think.” Manny replies “Thinking is fun. I like to think.” – Ken Davis

Kirkus Discoveries Reviews HIGHLY IRREGULAR STORIES by Richard Grayson

Kirkus Discoveries reviewed Highly Irregular Stories by Richard Grayson on July 14:



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.

Kaye Trout Book Reviews reviews HIGHLY IRREGULAR STORIES by Richard Grayson

Kaye Trout's Book Reviews has reviewed Highly Irregular Stories by Richard Grayson:

Wednesday, June 21, 2006
HIGHLY IRREGULAR STORIES by Richard Grayson

Dumbo Books of Brooklyn
72 Conselyea Street, Brooklyn, NY 11211
http://dumbobooksofbrooklyn.blogspot.com
www.richardgrayson.com
Genre: Fiction/Humor
Rating: Unusual
ISBN: 1411657969, $12.95, 177 pp, 2006

Highly Irregular Stories is, indeed, a most appropriate title for this compilation of prior writings: Disjointed Fictions, Eating at Arby’s, The Greatest Short Story That Absolutely Ever Was and Narcissism and Me.

Richard Grayson opens with: "The anarchist’s bomb that killed Czar Alexander II in St. Petersburg in 1881 led to the Russian pogroms and the anti-Semite May Laws of 1882. To these events we Americans owe countless things: the comedy of Woody Allen and Lenny Bruce; the popularity of psychoanalysis . . ."

It’s interesting that Woody Allen and psychoanalysis are first among his list and that’s just what I was feeling as I read this book. Grayson has taken that Woody Allen-type New York humor about a self-deprecating, neurotic, talented man one step further into the twilight zone.

As I’m not a New Yorker and never could fully appreciate Woody Allen’s humor, I’ll let the book stand on its own. My experience of reading Eating at Arby’s about Manny and Zelda in downtown Miami brought back memories of learning to read with Dick and Jane. It almost has the same rhythm and meaningful depth. We were just missing "See Spot run."

But to be fair, I would like to quote from "Myself Redux" which I particularly enjoyed: one, for the historical perspective and two, for the Kurt Vonnegut-flavor of humor:

""On Wednesday, the thirteenth day of October in the year many people call 49 B.C., Caius Julius Caesar, a Roman general, crossed the ancient watery boundary between Cisaplin Gaul and Italy known as the River Rubicon, thus making immortal the phrase "to cross the Rubicon," meaning "to take a decisive and irrevocable step."

Precisely two millennia later, on Wednesday, the thirteenth of October in the Christian year 1951, my Jewish parents took a decisive and irrevocable step in a room of the Quality Courts Motel outside Corning, New York. Within a week, the embryo that was to become the person writing these words was as large as one of Caius Julius Caesar’s fingernails. A tube formed within the embryo. This enlarged at a certain point, and then it began to pulsate. Eventually this pulsating tube developed into a four-chambered organ which circulated the fluid known as blood throughout my body.

On Sunday, October 17, 1971, 185 years and one day after the establishment of the United States Bureau of the Mint, I decided that my four-chambered pulsating organ had been broken because I had found the 18-year-old female whom I described as my "girlfriend" in bed with my 16-year-old brother, their four-chambered organs pulsating rapidly.

One week later, on the twenty-sixth anniversary of the establishment of the United Nations, I attempted to stop the pulsating of my four-chambered organ by making a three centimeter incision with a razor blade across my left wrist.

The following Monday, October 25, 1971, known that year as "Veterans Day" due to federal legislation enacted to give citizens a three-day holiday weekend, I found myself in the offices of the clinical psychologist Marilyn Wertheim, crying into a tissue.""

The story goes on to tell us: his girlfriend becomes pregnant, his brother is killed when hit by a bus, he marries his girlfriend, she has the baby, he doesn’t know whether he’s a father or an uncle, the baby dies, and they annul the marriage. There’s more but that will give you an idea of the beginning.

So, if you’re a Woody Allen fan and using the same stuff as Richard, you just might enjoy this book and a trip into the twilight zone.

Richard Grayson is a prolific writer and to appreciate who he is, what he has accomplished and what he has written, I refer you to his website: www.richardgrayson.com.

Reviewed by Kaye Trout - June 21, 2006 - Copyright

That Girl Who Writes Stuff reviews HIGHLY IRREGULAR STORIES by Richard Grayson

That Girl Who Writes Stuff has blogged about Highly Irregular Stories:

Highly Irregular Stories by Richard Grayson

Aside from finding dirty bits on the internet to flash at you, I spent part of my weekend sunning myself like a walrus and reading Richard Grayson’s Highly Irregular Stories.

The book is a compilation of four out-of-print chapbooks (Disjointed Fictions, Eating at Arby’s: The South Florida Stories (my favorite), The Greatest Short Story That Absolutely Ever Was, and Narcissism and Me.

If you are unfamiliar with the bizarre tales of Mr. Grayson I have much to share with you.

He’s odd.

A very odd man indeed.

And funny, funny, funny.

I could describe his stories’ weirdness to you but that’d be like talking through a bucket of water.

You really need to be submerged in it too to get the full effect.

But if you insist . . .

Here are few of the sections I highlighted and smiley-faced in my copy.

I’m a geek, I know.

Just let it be.

I also realize that only showing you nuggets from his stories is a little like showing you a box with a severed finger in it and running off giggling. . . . you need some context.

That’s fine.

I understand that.

And for some reason still don’t care.

So, enjoy the severed nuggets:

From Disjointed Fictions:

Ordinary Peepholes:

My eye catches an unauthorized advertisement scrawled on the subway map across from my seat:

FOR A GOOD LAY CALL 969-9970

It’s bad enough that this is my sister’s phone number, but what really hurts is that the handwriting is unmistakably my father’s. (p. 7)


Escape from the Planet of Humans:

She is tall, slightly chubby, with frizzy long brown hair and a scar on her nose. She wears a flannel shirt over a turtleneck, faded jeans, work boots, hoop earrings and a red kerchief. She reminds me of something else.

Our eyes meet once. Neither of us really smiles.

I look down at her application to graduate school and mentally note her name and address. I hand another man two dollars and receive some coins back in return. Then I go home and I write this letter:

Dear Rebecca Archer:
You don’t know me but I stood next to you today at the copy center. You are the most beautiful lesbian I have ever seen. Good luck with your grad school applications.
Sincerely yours,
(My name)

Guess what happens next (p.41)


Eating at Arby’s: The South Florida Stories:

I’m not even going to show you a passage. Just know that the funniest two characters you are ever going to meet play here.


From Narcissism and Me:

Some Arbitrary Answers:

I ask my mother what kind of birth control she uses.
“Headaches, she says. . . . .

I ask my brother’s girlfriend’s father’s grandmother’s doctor’s dentist’s mother’s therapist’s rabbi what life is all about.

“Headaches,” the rabbi says. (156 -7)

Get your copy here

Another Chicago Magazine (ACM) reviews Richard Grayson's I BRAKE FOR DELMORE SCHWARTZ

On pages 123-125 of its summer 1984 issue, Another Chicago Magazine (ACM) has a review by Robin Hemley of Richard Grayson's I Brake for Delmore Schwartz:


I BRAKE FOR DELMORE SCHWARTZ, Stories by Richard Grayson (ZephyrPress, 13 Robinson Street, Somerville,MA 02145, 95 pp.) $4.95

Here is an imaginative and engaging writer who breaks all the conventions of contemporary fiction with a devilish relish. Grayson gets away with everything your Writing Teachers told you not to do. His stories are self-conscious, fragmentary, and biggest sin of them all, usually plotless. But we forgive Richard Grayson all his sins, mostly because he is so imaginative and clever, and he has such a strong, compelling voice. Totally unafraid to take risks, Grayson tells stories from the point of view of a man in love with Nikita Khrushchev, a man obsessed with the fact that he looks like Delmore Schwartz, and even from the perspective of the cold that killed our ninth President, William Henry Harrison. Personification. Another sin.

At various points in his narratives, Grayson dares you to read on: "You really want to read this?" he asks at the beginning of "Nice Weather, Aren't We?" "You don't have to, just to humor me. It's all right. I know I'm a nice guy, I don't have to prove anything to you. . . " With a beginning like this, my first reaction is, "You're right. I don't have to read this," and I almost put down the story as my nagging Writing Teachers would have me do. But Writing Teachers are a little like your conscience; they're meant to be ignored. And Grayson's voice helps you ignore them. When I started this story, I thought it would be my least favorite, but now I think it's one of his best. He keeps setting you up in this story, telling you he only writes true stories, that everything he says is true, and then destroying each one of these illusions. And each time he does it, you masochistically want him to go on manipulating you. He manipulates you with such a flair and with such whimsical details that you can't hold it against the guy: "Sometimes you hear the craziest things. Writers like me often jot them down in notebooks so we can work them into our stories. I got on the elevator the other day and this old lady with a poodle looks at me with a smile and says, 'Nice weather, aren't we?' Weird. That's going to go in one of my stories some day."

Yes, Grayson's stories are metafictional, but he's not just another Coover, Barth, or Donald Barthelme. Though Grayson isn't quite as polished as these writers, he's got something else over them. He's not simply concerned with breaking stylistic conventions and letting things like character fall by the wayside. Grayson's stories, however wild, are humane. And the first person functions as a well-rounded, independent character in Grayson's work, often taking on a confessional attitude.

The titles in this collection are often as whimsical as the stories they describe: "Oh Khrushchev, My Khrushchev," "Slightly Higher in Canada," "Y/Me," "That's Saul, Folks." Still, as much as I am engaged by Richard Grayson's writing, I feel a bit like like someone reporting on an underachieving genius. Sometimes his rule-breaking doesn't work, and his stories are a little too spare, fragmented, and self-indulgent. At these times I'd like to go up to Mr. Grayson, shake him by the shoulders, and say, "Get serious, stop having so much fun. Now let's see what you can really do." I recognize this reaction might just be one of those little Writing Teachers getting to me again, but like your conscience, they can't always be ignored.

One thing's for certain, though. Grayson always hits the mark as far as voice is concerned. Few contemporary American writers have such a compelling, intriguing voice, totally believable and unabashedly contrived at the same time.

- Robin Hemley

The St. Petersburg Times reviews Richard Grayson's I BRAKE FOR DELMORE SCHWARTZ

The St. Petersburg Times reviews Richard Grayson’s I Brake for Delmore Schwartz on Sunday, September 4, 1983:


Self-conscious writer draws strength from humor

___________________________________________
I Brake for Delmore Schwartz
By RICHARD GRAYSON
Zephyr Press, $9.95, hardcover; $4.95 paper
Reviewed by SANDRA THOMPSON
___________________________________________

Richard Grayson, author of I Brake for Delmore Schwartz, a collection of fifteen short stories with such unlikely titles as “Nice Weather, Aren’t We?” “Is This Useful? Is This Boring?” and “Oh Khrushchev, My Khrushchev,” is a displaced New Yorker who has been teaching and writing on Florida’s East Coast for the past two years.

A word of warning: Grayson is a self-conscious writer who enters into direct dialogue with his readers—that means you—but in a much different way than Henry Fielding did in his “Dear Reader” passages in Tom Jones. Times have changed since our first novelistic fiction, and Grayson will be the first to tell you so.

He begins “Nice Weather, Aren’t We?” with “You really want to read this?” Two pages later, the narrator says, “Do you realize that since the beginning of this story, about a hundred people have died? In real life, I mean.” Then he talks about a fellow student in one of his writing classes, whom he calls “Ruth.” He hates Ruth because she never changes the names of the characters in her stories. Then we learn that the fictional “Ruth” is actually real-life “Bruce,” but the narrator changes his name to Ruth for purposes of the story, especially citing his line, “Fiction’s no stranger than Ruth.” If he had said, “Fiction’s no stranger than Bruce,” he points out, “It wouldn’t have had half the impact. And I’m not sure how much impact it had.”


THEN, he tells the reader that while he was writing that, Bruce walked in—and slugged him.

Seemingly without shame, Grayson commits what some writers consider to be a professional sin: writing about writers. He even writes about a relatively new and controversial phenomenon among contemporary American writers: university creative writing program. I know from where Grayson speaks, because I am a graduate of a university creative writing program; in fact, the same university creative writing program as Grayson. Which doesn’t mean Richard Grayson is a friend of mine—that’s not why I’m writing this review. Actually, I hardly know the guy. (This is the kind of inside info Grayson gives you in his stories.) He tells us about one creative writing professor who calls himself a “post-contemporary writer” and another who teaches him that “every story must have a beginning, a middle, and an end—‘preferably not in that order.’”

Clearly, the meaning an value of contemporary fiction intrigue Grayson. In “Nice Weather, Aren’t We?” the narrator tells us, “I only write true stories. I used to be an editor at a big publishing house in New York and every day manuscripts would arrive. . . accompanied by cover letters like the following ‘Dear Sir: I am presenting a novel about a Turkish princess who became a gunfighter and a sheriff in the Old West to protect her Christian Arab people from the hostility of the Anglo-American outlaws during the days of the cattle boom after the Civil War. . .”

Grayson concludes, “They ought to give the electric chair to whoever tells people that ‘everybody’s got one good novel in them.’”


GRAYSON TAKES some chances. For instance, I can’t think of any other writer who has written in the voice of a germ—as Grayson does in “The Autobiography of William Henry Harrison’s Cold,” in which the cold sees itself as a presidential assassin.

Grayson’s great strength is his humor, and his best stories are the ones that stop a laugh short of heartbreak. “Slightly Higher in Canada” begins with this sentence: “When my aunt called to say that my father had gone to England to get married to some little tramp, I was the one to tell my mother.” The next morning their mother doesn’t wake up; after she does, the narrator and his sister take her to stay with her parents in a retirement community outside Fort Lauderdale. The mother sits out in the sun with her straps lowered, the grandfather plays poker, and the grandmother fixes starchy meals. “Altogether we were down there three months. Over the television they would always tell us the weather up North was bad. Sometimes people came down from the North and they would say the weather wasn’t all that bad, but nobody in the condominium would believe them.

So things go until this line: “After my sister drowned I didn’t think much about it until my father came to Florida with his new wife.” The narrator starts fooling around with drugs, getting high, and “seeing girls who looked like my sister from the back” until his grandfather tells him to go away. He does, to Canada—hence the title of the story.

In “Reluctance,” a young boy is told by his great-grandmother that if he doesn’t wash his fingers “the Germans will get all over them. She said then the Germans would take over my whole body, and then when I was sleeping the Germans could take over my parents’ bodies, and finally the Germans could take over her own oh so large body. . . I did not want that, so I washed.” This very short story—it’s only two and a half pages—telegraphs to us in strong prose the story of this boy’s childhood. The ending brings us up short with his adult reality.

And in “Hold Me,” while the narrator is trying to explain the New Math to his sister, his father comes into the room, crying, and tells them he can’t live with them anymore. At the end of the story, the narrator, now an adult, calls a radio talk show, saying he wants to talk about sending troops to Zaire—but what he actually says is more immediate, more personal, and sad.

Actually—and now I’m telling the truth—I was lying when I said I hardly know Richard Grayson. After reading this collection of stories, I think I know him pretty well. So will you.

SANDRA THOMPSON
______________________________________

The author is a reporter for the Floridian section of the St. Petersburg Times. She has been a contributor to numerous magazines and is the winner of the 1982 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction.

Florida Literary Arts Review reviews Richard Grayson's I BRAKE FOR DELMORE SCHWARTZ and Raymond Federman's THE TWOFOLD VIBRATION

The current (1983) issue of Florida Literary Arts Review has a joint review of Richard Grayson's I Brake for Delmore Schwartz and Raymond Federman's The Twofold Vibration by the magazine's associate editor, Fiorella Orowan:

FICTIONS OF THE SELF

I Brake for Delmore Schwartz
Stories by Richard Grayson
Zephyr Press, 1983
95 pp., $4.95

The Twofold Vibration
by Raymond Federman
Univ. of Indiana Press, 1982 (repr)
175 pp., $10.95

by Fiorella Orowan


Aristotelian logic does not florish [sic] in Richard Grayson's stories. He instead favors the disjointed narrative:

The next day Caaron buys running shoes. They are ugly. They make her feel good. One thing Caaron has wanted to do is run outside. She runs inside to music, but not outside.

It is the patter and tone of a comic monologue wherein the writer calls attention to himself at intervals, reminding us how hard he is working to entertain:

I know people are making fun of me. But here, on the page, I can hide behind words. I manipulate words, manipulate characters, manipulate events.

Yes, but is it a story? Leaving no stones unturned, Mr. Grayson has an answer to that protest as well:

If you continue reading [this story] it will be on your head. Don't sink to my level. Read something uplifting, like Emerson.

This kind of hysterio comic speculation has pleased readers of, e.g., Tom Robbins who may discover in Grayson a new idol. Like Robbins, Grayson draws on popular culture and undergraduate sophistry to communicate with his peer audience, but his answers beg the question. To "ignore" Emerson, as he claims to do, by citing him is to demonstrate one's immunity to the System, although Mr. Grayson is very much a product of that system. Grayson's is not the nonconformist ethic of the Beats, but is rather a cozy conformity. "I'm a nice guy" he pleads repeatedly throughout the collection:

That's why I try to be witty and tell stories, using dreams and things I've heard around.

But all writers use experience. How are Grayson's characters unique?

When Robin was 16, there were no humid memories. She sang "Get Back" and "Light My Fire."

When Robin was 17, autumn leaves crunched when she stepped on them. She was nearly smothered.

When Robin was 18, she wondered what should be done on weekends.

When Robin was 19, she wrote an essay on envy.

When Robin was 20, there was still less of everything. She said nothing, she was told, but she said it well.

When Robin was 21, chapters were closed.

To the contrary, Robin is Everydebutante; her life is so dull that Babbitt and Mrs. Bridge are comparatively unique creations and this is perhaps the point: Grayson's fiction mirrors the minds of its audience, exploiting the commonplace. As his characters' memories are relentlessly ordinary, his narrative persona are always the same. Whether in first of [sic] third person, the narrator is invariably Grayson and the characters mere props for his perceptions. Consequently the shamelessly narcissistic diction flatters its readers to become the "I" of the story and thus to "write" vicariously through Grayson's creations. It is an insidious technique, but to his audience, it works.

Both the author-narrator and the jacket publicity identify Federman's novel with the work of Samuel Beckett and, in fact, the title is an excerpted quote from that playwright. "The twofold vibration" refers to a narrative technique of progressing simultaneously forward and backward in time and hence The Twofold Vibration must be classified as "avant garde." Federman is intensely self-conscious of both this and his other fictional techniques, as numerous quotes attest:

after all isn't it the role of ficiton, and I don't mean science fiction only, to alter reality for the better, the writer may not be as privileged as the scientist nowadays, or perhaps he is, who knows, for this oblique witness of reality must at the same time seek and avoid precision, he knows that the reality of imagination is more real than reality without imagination, and besides reality as such has never really interested anyone...

...it's a most puzzling piece of writing, totally incoherent and yet quite moving, I don't think it has ever been properly understood...

...[the narrators] have been introduced simply for the convenience of the narrative...to allow some shifts of point of view and some creative free play

The narrators are three: one represented simply by the first person (I), one named Moinous ("I/we") and the third is called Namredef (Federman spelled backward). Thus, all three narrators are in fact the author and the "shifts" in viewpoint are merely the author's argument with himself. The novel has no other real characters but an anonymous "old man" which the cynical reader may fairly interpret as, again, the author persona. It is the hapless old man around whom the plot weaves as he experiences various misfortunes including food poisoning and the threat of "deportation to the colonies," but the frequent allusions to Nazi concentration camps makes the futuristic aspects of the plot a mere foil for the novel's real concern, the society's systematic elimination of "undesirables." The novel is ostensibly set in the 1990s, but the only credible aspects of descriptive writing are clearly grounded in Postwar sociology with some gadget accessories very much like those in the James Bond films. Federman's narrators do have some experiences - singly and as a group - on their own, mostly as transients in Eurore, looking for sexual diversion.

The techniques of Beckett and other avant gardists notwithstanding, Mr. Federman's real interest is didactic, and his narrators deliver countless sermons on the decay of civilization, the failure of the System and the sterility of modern life. Despite his characters' defensiveness regarding style and diction, there is no distancing from the relentlessly outre form to suggest that the novel is intended as a parody; one must believe that Mr. Federman is serious in his cavalierly pursuit of Armageddon. One of his lectures, on "why it had to be written this way," provides the prototypical raison d'etre for anti-form:

...the voices on the text exist only as a sequence of cries, the voices can be extended beyond the text into history, but one can never find the door that leads to the origin or the end of the little boy's story...

The message: fictional form is artificial and is not true to the strettolike unbroken continuity of history, human experience or real life. But of course, Mr. Federman, that's why we call it "fiction."
_____________________________


Fiorella Orowan is Assoc. Ed. of F.L.A.R.