The PODler:
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
Grayson looks through shifting viewpoints (gay and straight; white and black; American and immigrant; young and old) at the people, times, and palaces of a fictional Brooklyn.

In these fictions, Grayson meditates on various topics, mostly race, sexual identity, age, and change by using the device of popular culture, mixing in liberally the icons of pop culture with persons and places from memory to construct a solid literary edifice.

The collection is filled with resonant stories about the lives of ordinary people, and this focus is what makes them interesting and memorable. Somehow, though Grayson's master touch, the ordinary becomes fascinating and highly readable literature. Many of these stories, however, reflect a deep sadness that exists in the heart of the common man and his experience. Nothing seems to happen for the protagonists in these stories, their lives stupefying their subjects. Grayson reminds us with his fiction that our lives are, in the end, rather banal, revolving around the mundane, the ordinary, and the common. At the same time, there seems to be a kind of weird current of apathy that flows beneath the surface of the stories. In the title story, we wonder, for example, whether the narrator is incredibly open-minded about his son's sexuality and the kiss between the boys, or whether he's just too apathetic to care, and we wonder because the title seems to be a kind of subconscious expression of protest by the protagonist. Apathy, or more precisely, a kind of stupefaction, perhaps synergized by the bathos of pop culture, rears its head in Shirtless Tea-bag Eating White Boys, in which two characters, one stupefied by Haldol, the other just tranquilized by American culture, watch internet videos, which somehow are appropriate for the mentally dysfunctional character and the young elementary school teacher; the first prefers to watch a purple hippo, and the latter prefers to view shirtless tea-bag eating white boy clips.

Some of these stories are biographical, and those are the stories that I like the best. Especially likable are Branch Libraries of Southeastern Brooklyn, in which Grayson's character reminisces about the libraries that he had known and how they had evolved over the years-this one is probably my favorite story, as I do love libraries, and it seems that Grayson is a true lover of the library as well-and The Lost Movie Theatres of Southeastern Brooklyn and Rockaway Beach, another story of nostalgia and memory, where we are treated to reminiscences about the various theatres that the author remembers. 1001 Ways to Defeat Green Arrow deals with change in gay relationships and the longing and emptiness that result. My Life in The New York Post is a collection of strange but somehow funny clips from, apparently, the Post regarding a fictional Grayson's plots and schemes.

Other stories that I liked were In the Sixties, a kaleidoscope-like summary of the Sixties; Diary of a Brooklyn Cyclones Hot Dog, which deals with the life of a lesbian Uzbek immigrant who is promoted to being the Relish in a Hot Dog Race; and Mohammad's Therapy Monkey, in which the protagonist, a college student with some issues is assigned a roommate with a pet monkey, which helps him find acceptance and a relationship of his own in a place that he detests.

Grayson chronicles the real through his funny, sometimes sad, but always genuine, if slightly offbeat, fictional world.

New York Brain Terrain review on February 14, 2007: I was a frequent peruser of the Daily Cal , the school newspaper, and The Heuristic Squelch , the campus humor magazine, during my first two years in college. Squelch was often too raunchy and perverted for my tastes, but I loved their fake news round-ups and the letters from the editor. One particular letter from the editor that stands out in my mind is the one addressed to the freshman in fall 2000: "College," the editor opined, "is like a hypercolor t-shirt. It starts out with a brilliant pink burst of excitement, before slowly fading away to a blur of resentment and apathy." The editor also instructed the freshmen, "If you're one of those students who asks questions in lecture every day, just remember, there's a special circle in hell for you people." Richard Grayson's recent collection of short stories reminds me of The Heuristic Squelch, both in its smart humor and its ability to induce belly-aching laughs. Composed alternately of semi-autobiographical pieces and humorous shorts, Grayson weaves a picture of Brooklyn (and New York) that is rarely seen in New York literature nowadays. A native of Canarsie himself, Grayson's characters inhabit the outlying middle-class neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens: Flatbush, the Rockaways, Bensonhurst, Brighton Beach, Canarsie, and the like. His characters are wonderfully diverse, much like the city itself, ethnic, immigrants, LGBT--you'll not find a single straight upper-class WASP in the book (not that there's anything wrong with that). The strengths of this book, I felt, lay in its humorous shorts. A particular one that stands out in my mind is "Diary of a Brooklyn Cyclones Hot Dog," a tale of a lesbian Uzbekistani teen whose job is to dress up as Nathan's Relish Hot Dog. During each game, there is a race between Ketchup, Mustard, and Relish, and, much like the Trix Rabbit who never gets to eat Trix, Relish is never allowed to finish first in the race. However, like the Trix Rabbit, Relish starts out every race absolutely determined not to finish last, but some unfortunate incident befalls her each time. The semi-autobiographical short stories, while well-written, were a bit too confessional for my tastes; however, they are still interesting reads. Grayson's handling of his characters' sexuality is deft and never overbearing. Highly recommended. http://nybrainterrain.blogspot.com/

Philadelphia Inquirer

Reviewed by Susan Balée

Richard Grayson is a funny guy from Canarsie, Brooklyn, and he's been writing short fiction for decades. He's also a lawyer and a teacher, which doubtless does a better job of paying the bills. Which isn't to say he's not a wonderful fiction writer - he is - but his kind of metafiction, mixing his memories (numerous main characters are named Richie Grayson) with his inventions about pansexual borough dwellers dealing with minor and major crises, read like stand-up comedy routines. Only a few of the tales in this book (including the title story) are fully realized short stories in a traditional sense.

At first I wished he'd pen more of the longer, less autobiographical stories, but when I got into the rhythm of his riffs, I changed my mind. Here's his kind of shtick, from "In the Sixties": At the beginning of the Sixties women were girls and girls were chicks. By the end of the Sixties girls were women and chicks were poultry... . In the Sixties... I raised money for a black classmate indicted for murder. I raised money for a Chinese friend to have an abortion. I raised money for Chicano migrant workers I had never met, or expected to meet. Most of the money I raised originally belonged to other people's parents. This is very funny stuff, but it's a comic monologue rather than a story with the traditional elements of plot, characters, setting, and so forth.

Grayson has hit upon a good formula, though, to generate a piece of writing: the annotated list. Hence, he has "Seven Sitcoms," "Branch Libraries of Southeastern Brooklyn," "The Lost Movie Theaters of Southeastern Brooklyn and Rockaway Beach," and so on. But like Grandma's beef brisket, a little of this goes a long way. In these tales of places that mostly aren't there anymore, the main feeling induced in the reader is nostalgia. Unfortunately, if you're not from Brooklyn, much of it is nostalgia for something you never knew in the first place.

Still, in his memories of places he knew as a kid (Mill Basin library, for example, "where I first looked up 'homosexuality' in all the encyclopedias and dictionaries and where I watched the clock so I could go back home in time for Mom to think I'd actually been at Hebrew school, the place I was supposed to be"), we do learn a great deal about Richard Grayson, and he's an interesting guy. A bisexual kid who spent most of his teen years housebound by panic attacks, Grayson read and wrote (and watched TV - hence, "Seven Sitcoms") to survive. Finally, antidepressants helped him regain his sanity and get out of the house.

The fluid sexuality of the characters in these tales adds to their appeal, though mostly the gay main characters suggest Grayson at different ages, from uncertain virgin to gay role model for his young neighbors, Ryan and Sam: I don't get looked at much in any way anymore, definitely not by guys their age. Tempus fugited so fast it seemed like one day I went to bed looking like Chip and woke up the next morning looking like Uncle Charley.

Grayson's expertise on himself, his era, and his homeplace (Brooklyn) convince me that he should shape some of this material into a memoir and forget the metafiction for a while. Memoir is the genre in which Grayson, already an amply credentialed writer, could probably land a decent contract with a publisher people have actually heard of...

Richard Grayson has a fresh, funny voice... ______________________________
Susan Balée's comparative essay on playwrights David Hare and Tom Stoppard is forthcoming in the Michigan Quarterly Review.

From a Dec. 13 review at Book.of.the.moment:


About Richard Grayson's collection:

His sense of humor is unlike any I've encountered before, and he expresses his wit through his creation of a diverse group of characters. "And to Think That he Kissed Him on Lorimer Street" introduces characters such as a teenage lesbian from Uzbekistan, and a black gay college student who debates poisoning his Pakistani roommate's therapy monkey. Grayson skillfully expands on his memories of the past with a pop culture study of sorts..weaving his past memories into his observations and experiences in the here and now. All this is done with a wit that caused me to laugh out loud.

Jeff Bryant's review at Syntax of Things

Book Nineteen

And To Think That He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street
by Richard Grayson
Dumbo Books
Short Stories; 289 pp.

A few months ago I got an email from Richard Grayson asking if I would be interested in reading his new collection. He warned me that it would be a waste of my time and that the book might make for a better doorstop than reading material. Well, if a book has the potential to keep the cool breeze flowing through my room, I can't turn it down, probably would even read it before putting it to use. And I did. Read it. And man did I enjoy it. Grayson is nothing short of a master storyteller, a man willing to take chances, to mix the straightforward narrative with avant-garde twists. Letters to the editor, mysterious front-page ads in the New York Times, a very young Anderson Cooper, and references to YouTube and Myspace, all make for an interesting collage, a blend of nostalgia with the very contemporary. While Grayson's writing is for the most part spot on, the self-published nature of the collection means that one has to wade through a shallow swamp of typographical and assorted other errors which might be too much muck for a reader not willing to put up with these minor indiscretions. However, the stories in this collection are worth every slight error one encounters along the way. Highlights for me include the numerous recollections of the evolutions of theaters in Brooklyn and Broward County, the hilarious tale of a man forced to go to a lesser college by his zealous father and who ends up rooming with a monkey which he plots to kill after the monkey pees on his stuff, and the first line from the story "G--d Is My Fuckbuddy": "Significant others come and go but fuckbuddies can be forever." One can only speculate as to why a publisher didn't give this collection a shot, but luckily for us, Grayson did all the work himself. He's even made the book available as a free download, but save your eyes and give the man a few bucks. You'll be glad you did.

Pete Anderson's review:

Richard Grayson, And To Think That He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street
And To Think That He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street is a fine collection of stories from the prolific Richard Grayson. Grayson tells these twenty-nine stories exclusively from a first-person perspective, making them come off as at least partially autobiographical. The back cover copy admits as much, calling the book "part fictional memoir, part memorish fiction," and I've read just enough about Grayson's personal life to know that many of the narratives mirror his own life. This is a bit of a bold move in the post-Frey literary world, where questions over what is fact and what is fiction often distract the reader from the writer's main point--the telling of the story itself. Personally, I don't particularly care how much of these narratives came directly from Grayson's life, and how much he invented. The important thing is that the stories are compellingly readable; Grayson is a natural storyteller, tireless and inventive, and the Lorimer Street stories are of course him telling of his own life but, more importantly, of the world around him.

For me, three stories from the collection stand out. "Conselyea Street" tells of a middle-aged contractor who has lived his entire life in one Brooklyn brownstone, with several generations of his family living there during his youth. The brownstone--owned by his family for decades--is located in what has become a very trendy neighborhood, and the narrator faces the dilemma of choosing, for a tenant, between his young niece and his nearly-as-young lover (the latter, he suspects, is only interested in him for the apartment). He soberly faces a critical decision between keeping family tradition and satisfying fleetingly sensual needs.

"Bottom, New York Times, Front Page, Tiny Print" is a quietly heartbreaking story of a young man who has abandoned his family, which desperately tries contacting him via classified ads in the New York Times. As time goes on, their ads run less and less frequently as they slowly abandon hope of finding him again, and adjust to no longer having him in their lives.

Perhaps the strongest story, "The Lost Movie Theaters of Southeastern Brooklyn and Rockaway Beach," is told through Grayson's recurring device of a lengthy list of places and people from his life, with added commentary. In this story, he catalogs an extensive list of defunct movie theaters, each with its own distinct section and headings, mentioning where they were located, what movies he saw there and whom he saw them with, what became of the theater buildings and, indirectly, what each theater meant to his life. In one particularly poignant scene, he tries to convince his grandmother, implausibly, to see Boyz N the Hood with him.

"Richard," she said, "my movie-going days are over." Then she wanted to know why I didn't just go two doors down from the theater and bring back a movie from the video store.

"It's not the same thing," I said. I saw Boys N the Hood alone.

The Surfside closed three years later, a few months after my grandmother died.

Driving by on Rockaway Beach Boulevard last summer, I couldn't tell it had once been a movie theater.
This unexpected generational twist--his grandmother wanting to rent a movie, while he longs for the old-fashioned theater experience--was quite a nice touch. And the book is filled with similarly nice touches like this one. A very satisfying effort overall.

May 31, 2006 in Books

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.

Kirkus Discoveries

On November 20, "'Lorimer Street' Writer Turns the Pages on Brooklyn" by Helen Klein appeared in Brooklyn's Courier Life newspaper chain. Excerpts:

Here [is]autobiography seen through the lens of fiction, fiction created through the maze of past life re-imagined – not Proust, considerably less dense, for one thing, but certainly not the unProust.

This is not to say that the stories in Lorimer Street are inaccessible to anyone who did not share Grayson’s college days or his clearly not-forgotten youth. To the contrary, in some ways they are an evocation of the quintessential school days, the bittersweet portrait of the artist as a young man. Not coincidentally, the son of the narrator of the story after which the book is named, asks his father, “Hey, Dad, how’d you like a chance to relive your past?”

Not only do the stories fictionalize a past life, they evoke a Brooklyn of times gone by, a Brooklyn fading in memory as the old-timers move to Florida or die, leaving behind the vanished movie theaters and other borough landmarks recreated in Grayson’s book, written by him while he lived thousands of miles away.

Joyce may have been the first writer who dramatized the need to articulate his memories of his home from a vast distance; he is certainly not the last.

“It’s very much so that you have to leave a place to write about it,” agreed Grayson, who cited emotional distance as well as chronological distance as important elements in shaping memories for the translation into fiction. But, he pointed out, leaving does not mean abandoning. Throughout his adult life he has left the borough and returned, living in different neighborhoods for a month or a season at a time.

Which may be one reason why, unlike Joyce, Grayson doesn’t confine himself to the past. One of the stories in his most recent collection centers on a man taking his son to a concert at the Williamsburg hot spot, Northsix. Another is entitled, “Diary of a Brooklyn Cyclones Hot Dog.”

“There are a lot of writers who’ve written about Brooklyn,” mused Grayson during a phone interview that felt, many times, more like a conversation. “It’s different for every person because the borough is such a treasure trove of different experiences.”

Grayson’s Brooklyn was one not only defined by the movie theaters and branch libraries, but by the buses, which he rode, criss-crossing the borough. “I always liked to explore Brooklyn,” he recalled. “I used to collect bus transfers so I would ride every bus line from one end to the other, so I actually did see a lot of Brooklyn.”

Grayson has already written about the tension between the Brooklyn of 30 or 40 years ago and the Brooklyn of today, in the book’s title story, which, he said, “Is really about two Brooklyn’s. The narrator is probably around my age and he lives with his wife and his teenage son from his first marriage.”

While the story is set in Williamsburg, circa 2005, it features recurrent flashbacks to Canarsie in the 1960s, a time when Brooklyn was a borough defined by the middle-class families who had moved from cramped apartments in older buildings into newly built homes somewhat distant from subway lines, such as the one lived in by the Grayson family in Flatlands.

Now, he stressed, the borough is different. There has been a new wave of middle class immigrants, Grayson noted, as well as a massive dose of gentrification. “It’s shedding its destitute art student image,” he remarked, in a reference to a Post article. “It’s not the Brooklyn I grew up in.”

On November 7, a review by Jack Saunders appeared on The Underground Literary Alliance Book Reviews. Excerpts:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

On September 9, Judd Lear Silverman> posted this review:

If you're not familiar with the writer, Richard Grayson, you should be, especially those who love the short story form. Besides spending time on bogus runs for political office and publicity stunts that have graced People and Page Six in the Post, Grayson's been writing prolifically for years, and his first anthology, With Hitler in New York, was recently reissued. Other humorous writings have included the collections I Break for Delmore Schwartz, Eating at Arby's: The South Florida Stories, and Narcissism and Me, as well as a novella, The Silicon Valley Diet. [Some of these stories have also been reprinted in Highly Irregular Stories (Dumbo Books).] But his recent collection, entitled And to Think That He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street, is perhaps the best collection to start with, reflecting not only his gifts as a satirist but his ability to keep the mind so busy it doesn't know that the heart has been touched. Like a reality TV junkie, Grayson mixes seeming fact with fiction, borrowing names, places and people from his own life and shaping them into odd and effecting commentaries on the passage of time, family relationships, sexuality, race relations, and America's pathological preoccupation with celebrity. Some stories are quick brushstroke sketches of people and a particular time. Others are journeys told in vignettes stretching spans of 20-30 years. Friendships are explored in sideways glances, showing how the most unlikely of alliances can turn into lifelong relationships. Numerous stories (perhaps one too many for the same collection) are subdivided by real estate locations: old movie palaces, libraries, and shopping centers, where seemingly innocuous events are recalled that by the end of the story add up to a whole lifetime of experience. Grayson shape shifts from gay to straight, white to black, male to female, kid to aging wit. Grandparents and childhood buddies play recurrent and important roles, but discerning fact from fiction in Grayson's work is tricky until one considers these stories in the aggregate. In the biography of the great Italian filmmaker, Federico Fellini, the maestro is quoted as saying that the truth of his life is not in the facts reported by birth certificates, death notices and journalistic reportage, but in his art, his dreams, his films--it is in the revelation of the imagination that the real artist is known. Likewise, the truth of Grayson is in these tales, invented and reinvented versions of his life and experience. The facts may not be verifiable, but the affection and care he displays in his description of life's travels and the people in his life are real, resulting in stories that are affecting and sharply observed. Recommended. (Available at www.lulu.com)

Levi Asher at Literary Kicks

Richard Grayson's And To Think That He Kissed Him On Lorimer Street allows the touching moments to sneak up on the reader. This is a surprising collection of assorted writings by a veteran Brooklyn author who once published a diary of a New York City congressional campaign and has produced numerous other books with intriguing titles like The Boy Who Fell To Brooklyn and I Brake For Delmore Schwartz (a long list of the author's books can be found here). I really like the first story in this collection, in which a good-humored narrator chaperones his teenage son to a loud punk concert at the Northsix club in Brooklyn. His son is openly gay, and the title of the book is explained when the trio amass at the L Train subway entrance on Lorimer Street and the father averts his eyes, wondering at his own amazing tolerance, while the two boys kiss goodnight. Elsewhere, Grayson's book gives us a tour of Brooklyn neighborhoods, a list of bad sitcoms nobody else remembers, and many other scattered ideas. The book has more sprawl than focus, but then so does the borough it proudly represents.

From Wet Asphalt

Richard Grayson's new book And to Think That He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street is a collection of confessional fiction that I think illustrates both the best and the worst of how the style can be used. Much of Lorimer Street is clearly autobiographical—Grayson even uses his own name—and reads more like memoir than fiction, though at least once he plays around with this by making himself married to a woman and with children, while in the other stories he's an unmarried, aging homosexual. Grayson generally organizes these stories around themes and objects—e.g. libraries he used to go to or the dead silent film star who once lived in his house. In the story "Conselyea Street" he employs this trick to devastating effect as he tears off pieces of life in New York until the only thing left is real estate. By way of contrast there is "The Cool Guy," in which Grayson rambles on interminably about some guy he used to know, and how this guy dated this girl and then this other girl and then he (Grayson) dated this girl and now she's married and has kids and... wait, why am I reading this again? "The Cool Guy" feels like something Grayson copied right out of his diary.

There are other stories that (though still confessional) are more clearly fictional, and those are the high-points of the collection. Richard Grayson has been around for a long time and his practiced simplicity is easy to read; his prose manages to be lean without being terse. Among these more fictional stories is a tale about a foreign girl who is one of the hot dog mascots for the Coney Island Cyclones baseball team. Another is about a kid in college whose Muslim roommate has a therapy monkey. A third is about a guy whose pushy female friend gets off on watching the protagonist kiss her boyfriend. These are all fun to read and a story collection made up entirely of stories like these would deserve glowing praise. As it stands parts of this book make clear that Richard Grayson is very good at writing fiction, while other parts make you wish he would actually write some.

The question then isn't "can Richard Grayson write," it's why is he typing out these boring autobiographical numbers?...

Grayson...refers to "...the small press that published... my book of idiotic stories." Which might be funny if he didn't sound serious, and this wasn't a book of "idiotic" stories published by a small press. Grayson's work paints a portrait of a talented writer whose ambition has washed away in a sea of middling reviews and self-pity. This is a man who has given up, and I'm not talking about going to law school, I can understand resigning yourself to not making a living as a writer when so few do. It's like he's given up on being read, he's given up on literature, and he's given up on mattering. And frankly if he thinks so poorly of his own work then why is he inflicting it on other people at all? Why bother?

What happened to you, Richard?

Whatever happened, I think it's the real reason for the uneven quality of the stories in this collection. This is the work of a good writer who doesn't think what he does matters anymore. And that's kind of sad and unfortunate. Richard, come back.