Richard Grayson Books In Order

Collections

  1. With Hitler in New York (1979)
  2. Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog (1982)
  3. I Brake for Delmore Schwartz (1983)
  4. I Survived Caracas Traffic (1996)
  5. The Silicon Valley Diet (2000)

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Richard Grayson Books Overview

With Hitler in New York

An underground classic, Grayson’s debut short story collection introduced readers to the author’s quirky, funny postmodern fiction and such characters as Buddy’s grandfather, who wonders why no Jewish people ever win on ‘Bowling for Dollars’ and thinks that Farrah Fawcett has a foreign accent; Sarah Lawrence of Arabia, who hides under a college student’s bed while his mother and her maid won’t stop cleaning his room; ‘Chief Justice Burger, Teen Idol’; the depressed superhero Ordinary Man, whose sinus problems cause him to spit phlegm at his arch enemy Professor Should; and the cast of the 27 year old TV soap opera ‘Go Not to Lethe,’ including the actress who once played Richie’s girlfriend and who will not return to the show unless it will get her father out of a Na*zi concentration camp; in the title story, Hitler himself arrives at Kennedy Airport via Laker Airlines and proceeds to endear himself to the residents of Brooklyn. The Los Angeles Times said, ‘Grayson is shaking funny ingredients like dice.’

Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog

These twenty two fictions display a versatility which commands attention. Best SellersHas the character of both parody and the play that is at the heart of narrative technique. Small Press ReviewSplendid. The Orlando Sentinel

I Brake for Delmore Schwartz

Grayson is a born storyteller and standup talker Highly recommended. Library Journal Grayson’s stories are full on insanity, nutty therapists, cancerous relatives, broken homes, fiction workshops, youthful theatricals at Catskill bungalow colonies and the morbid wizardry of telephone answering machines. Ivan Gold, New York Times Book Review Here is an imaginative and engaging writer who breaks all the conventions of contemporary fiction with a certain devilish relish. Robin Hemley, Another Chicago Magazine Disingenuous confessions of the writer s ineptitude are suffused with the appealing confessional anxiety of a small time writer scrabbling against odds. Jaimy Gordon, American Book Review

I Survived Caracas Traffic

Richard Grayson’s new book of short fiction features previously uncollected stories by the writer Publishers Weekly has called ‘a versatile, interesting experimenter’ and Library Journal has termed ‘a born storyteller and standup talker.’ The author is known primarily as a satirist and humorist, and the stories in this, his eighth collection, will not disappoint those fans who have come to expect mordant wit and barbed humor, but Grayson here shows that the true comic writer, as Flannery O’Connor once observed, deals with matters of life and death.

The Silicon Valley Diet

The bassist in a gay punk band reflects on his troubled relationship with the band’s guitarist/singer. In the wake of the Matthew Shepard murder, a Wyoming ranch manager conceals his affair with another man. A young African American breaks up with his white boyfriend at a series of dinners at Cuban Chinese restaurants. The attempt to repeal a gay rights ordinance divides a Southern college town. And in the title story, a downsized computer engineer tutors a gay Vietnamese immigrant in pop culture, cyberspace, and weight loss only to learn a vital lesson about American life circa Y2K. Welcome to the world of Richard Grayson, the writer ‘Newsday’ called ‘convulsively inventive’ and ‘Kirkus Reviews’ found ‘oddly charming.’ In ‘The Silicon Valley Diet,’ his ninth collection of short stories, Grayson zeroes in on gay baby boomers and Gen Xers making their way in a wired world.

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