Richard Grayson

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www.richardgrayson.com > > My Books: With Hitler in New York and Other Stories (New York: Taplinger, 1979; paperback reprint: Lincoln, NE: iUniverse/Backinprint.com, 2000). "Where avant garde fiction goes when it becomes standup comedy." -- Rolling Stone "Grayson is shaking funny ingredients together like dice." -- Los Angeles Times "The reader is dazzled by the swift, witty goings-on." -- Newsday "Really funny" -- New York Daily News "Like prose photographs by a paparazzo...quick, conscious attempts to dazzle....An innovative (and talented) comedian...." -- Library Journal "....shines with intelligence and even wit." -- Cleveland Plain Dealer "Grayson uses more diverse voices than any writer.... At the same time he maintains a distinctive quality" -- Washington Review of the Arts "Fictions marked by comic exuberance and sympathy...a bit of extended tom-foolery... particularly appropriate for comedy." -- Bellingham Review "A dash of New York, a snippet of sadness, a gaggle of goonies....something to satisfy even a wacko." -- Harrisburg Patriot-News ***** Lincoln's Doctor's Dog and Other Stories (Adelphi, MD: White Ewe, 1982; paperback reprint: Lincoln, NE: iUniverse/Backinprint.com, 2001). "Grayson is serious and comic, charming, given to outrageous puns, and a sharp-eyed observer of and participant in life's absurdities.... These twenty-two fictions display a versatility which commands attention." -- Best Sellers "Has the character of both parody and the play that is at the heart of new narrative technique." -- Small Press Review "This writer is not afraid to take risks, and he can be very funny indeed.... a versatile, interesting experimenter." -- Publishers Weekly "Grayson has a splendid command of language, he is steeped in literary history, is highly intelligent." -- Orlando Sentinel ***** I Brake for Delmore Schwartz (Somerville, MA: Zephyr, 1983; paperback reprint: Lincoln, NE: iUniverse/Backinprint.com, 2005). Selected for National Endowment of the Arts Small Press Exhibit, Frankfurt Book Fair, 1984 "Grayson is a born storyteller and standup talker...Highly recommended." -- Library Journal "Few contemporary American writers have such a compelling, intriguing voice." -- Another Chicago Magazine "Grayson's stories are full of insanity, nutty therapists, cancerous relatives, broken homes, fiction workshops, youthful theatricals at Catskill bungalow colonies and the morbid wizardry of telephone answering machines." -- New York Times Book Review "Disingenuous confessions of the writer's ineptitude...suffused with the appealing confessional anxiety of a small-time writer scrabbling against odds." -- American Book Review ***** I Survived Caracas Traffic: Stories from the Me Decades (Greensboro, NC: Avisson, 1996; paperback reprint: Lincoln, NE: iUniverse/Backinprint.com, 2002). "An underground post-modernist who writes comic fiction crammed with details adopted from pop culture and the daily news... 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 Reviews "Mr. Grayson shows a sense of humor and an appreciation of the weird. The costs of survival in the AIDS retrospective title story, and the isolating entropy of depression in 'Where the Glacier Stops' manage to imbue their drained narrators with some emotional weight. On the whimsical side, 'Twelve Step Barbie' sees the doll in a midlife crisis, and 'A Clumsy Story' artfully diagrams and parodies MFA-quality fiction." -- Publishers Weekly "It's the incessant familiarity of the writer's secret self that makes his world entertaining and bizarre.... The dialogue is consistently, even ingeniously funny. Grayson excels at diverting the flow of action so nothing expected ever happens...bright and keenly made." -- New York Times Book Review "Swiftly drawn characters rendered in sharp paradoxical sentences." -- American Book Review ***** The Silicon Valley Diet and Other Stories (Los Angeles: Red Hen Press, 2000). "Compulsively talky and engagingly disjunctive, the 12 stories in Grayson's ninth collection flash snapshots of gay men in their 20s, 30s and 40s battling it out in an online world. Lighter and funnier than much gay fiction, the stories riff on contemporary consumer culture and introduce sweet, mixed-up characters. Grayson knows New York City -- where many of these stories are set -- inside and out." -- Publishers Weekly "Although memorial services for young men seem commonplace in Grayson's fiction, the stories are not tragedies. They serve up slices of life as we know it right here and now with hate crimes, weight worries and easy money for Internet whizzes....Funny, intelligently written and original. These stories accurately capture snapshots of our culture at a very interesting moment. 'The Silicon Valley Diet and Other Stories' sets out to prove we haven't really lost our humanity under the deluge of technology. And we probably never will." -- South Florida Sun-Sentinel "Grayson's ninth collection of stories achieves many goals, and he is clearly a master of the genre....Wherever Grayson casts his gaze, he manages to isolate panoramas of city and small town life in America from the 60s to the present.... There are many layers to this detailing of the techno-ridden superficialities of our contemporary life with its bar codes, microwave ovens, and cyberspeak." -- American Book Review "Humor as dry as the desert and an assortment of nerdy-but-likable Seinfeldian characters...will keep you turning the pages." -- Echo Magazine "Funny, clever, tightly written...balances neurotic self-awareness with a genuine sense of empathy and humor." -- Joey Magazine ***** Chapbooks, now collected as Highly Irregular Stories (Brooklyn: Dumbo Books, 2006) Disjointed Fictions (Harrisburg, PA: Cumberland, 1981). "These literary morsels and tidbits suggest a very fine talent." -- Smudge Review Eating at Arby's: The South Florida Stories (New York: Grinning Idiot, 1982). "A style equidistant between Hemingway and Dick and Jane." -- New York Times Book Review "A satirist and parodist so timely that his brothers and sisters may not yet discern themselves in his mirror." -- American Book Review The Greatest Short Story That Absolutely Ever Was (New Orleans: Lowlands, 1989). "Quite possibly the funniest short story writer on the literary scene today, Grayson proves that just being himself, including all that encompasses his many alter egos awash with his self-conscious approach to parody, is enough to keep the reader in a bewildered state of laughter." -- YU News Syndicate Narcissism and Me (New York: Mule & Mule, 1990). "Experimental fiction that combines humor with tragic touches to create sympathetic characters-- real people who stumble into the surreal, surreal people who happen to be real." -- New Pages "Along with Barthelme and Barth, Grayson occupies an important place in the trajectory of experimental fiction, certainly as it's currently being practiced. These stories are endlessly inventive and playful, exhaustive without at all being tiresome, and pack gravity where you least expect it. Eggers owes as much to him as to Foster Wallace. So does Foster Wallace." - www.lowblueflame.com “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 (New York: Grinning Idiot, 2005). Originally appeared at McSweeney's "In 2004, Richard Grayson (author of With Hitler in New York and And To Think He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street) ran as a write-in Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives against a firmly entrenched Republican incumbent.  His opponent, Republican Representative Ander Crenshaw, is almost abstract in his role as antagonist, having enough funding, support, and staff that defending his seat barely requires he even take notice of Grayson, who has no staff, no funding, and, at least, initially, no support.  It's to Grayson's great credit that although he always knows what the outcome will be in his race for the House, he still puts an admirable amount of effort and time into reaching each potential supporter he comes across...Grayson writes with a self-deprecating wit and a keen eye for the realities of both our overall political situation and that of Florida's Fourth District, where his campaign takes place.  Times move fast, and after the semi-uplifting Democratic victory this past November, it may be hard to remember exactly how bleak things felt for progressive or Democratic voters in late 2004, but Grayson's diary, written in the heat of the moment, manages to chronicle not only the desperate backdrop of that election but also the awakening sense of progressive community that was nearly destroyed by the spirit-crushing reelection of George W. Bush and his Congress.  Grayson writes much like he ran for the House, in that he isn't so much trying to convert us as voters as much as he is trying to show us that we do still have options when he vote, despite what our political situation seems to allow."...Clocking in at just over one hundred pages, Grayson's Diary of a Congressional Candidate in Florida's Fourth Congressional District is a deceptively quick read.  Still, it's bigger than it looks.  I finished the book in a single evening, but have found myself returning to it to enjoy not only the absurdity of the political situations but also the fine humor of Grayson's prose and the sense of comradery that permeates every page.  He so openly shares the details of his ironic, winking candidacy that it's impossible not to cheer him on.  Towards  the end, a voter writes Grayson a letter thanking him for trying that the voter signs "your constituent," a sentiment that I too felt by the time I turned the final page.  Although Grayson lost the race, his book tells it like a victory march, celebrating every small triumph won against impossible odds.  I couldn't agree more." -- Matt Bell ***** Coming June 2006: And to Think That He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street (Brooklyn: Dumbo Books, 2006). "The dynamic Brooklyn cityscape serves as the backdrop in this beguiling collection of short stories. Graysons 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 roommates 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 familys 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. Graysons 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 neighborhoods demographic transitionsfrom Italian to Hispanic to hipster to yuppiefuse vivid characters with a keen sense of place and cultural specificity. A funny, odd, somehow familiar and fully convincing fictional world." -- Kirkus Discoveries, April 13, 2006 > Here, here, here, and here are recent stories.