Read The Written Nerd’s interview with OTBKB pal, Richard Grayson. Find out whether he thinks there’s a Brooklyn literary sensibility? Which writers or works most emblematize Brooklyn. Which older writers set the tone? Which contemporary writers he reads with interest. Here’s an excerpt.

Growing up, I loved books about other kids in Brooklyn: first and foremost, Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and then Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep, Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones, Irving Shulman’s The Amboy Dukes and later Chaim Potok’s The Chosen and Jay Neugeboren’s An Orphan’s Tale.

Other great older Brooklyn books are Daniel Fuchs’ Williamsburg Trilogy, Wallace Markfield’s hilarious To an Early Grave (later turned into the film Bye Bye Braverman), Aflfred Kazin’s A Walker in the City, Michael Stephens’ Brooklyn Book of the Dead, Jack Pulaski’s The St. Veronica Gig Stories (a terrific Williamsburg book), Hubert Selby Jr.’s Last Exit to Brooklyn, Pietro di Donato’s Christ in Concrete and Bernard Malamud’s The Assistant.

Fiction
writers whose works emblemize Brooklyn for me also include Irwin Shaw,
Norman Mailer, Woody Allen (whose photo I used to pass every day
changing classes at Midwood), Gilbert Sorrentino, James Purdy, Paula
Fox, Pete Hamill, Gloria Naylor, Jonathan Baumbach, Susan Fromberg
Schaeffer, Jane Schwartz, Thomas Glynn, Jacqueline Woodson, Pietro di
Donato, Thomas Boyle, Edwidge Danticat, and Robert Greenfield.