Should be a great show: Richard Grayson, author of, AND TO THINK HE KISSED HIM ON LORMER STREET and Leora Skolkin-Smith, author of EDGES: O ISRAEL, O PALESTINE will read.
8 p.m. at the Old Stone House. Fifth Avenue between 3rd and 4th Streets in Park Slope. For info and directions: www.theoldstonehouse.org or www.brooklynreadingworks.com
$5.00. Refreshments and books to buy.
review from Kirkus Discoveries, April 13, 2006:
REVIEW OF GRAYSON’S short story collection by Kirkus Discoveries:
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.