And to Think That He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street and Other Stories by Richard Grayson just got a good review at Booklist. The author, a reader of OTBKB, sent me a note about the book, which we both agree will be of interest to OTBKB readers. He will be reading at Brookyn Reading Works in the fall.

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.

Read an an excerpt from the story: And to Think That He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street by Richard Grayson…

 

Excerpt from the story: And to Think That He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street by Richard Grayson

Laura says Labor Day is the most bittersweet of holidays. As a kid
growing up in Canarsie, I dreaded the end of summer, but I also felt
the blank sheets in my loose-leaf binders were all potential A’s or
100’s.

By October’s first chill, my papers bloodied with corrections and
bad grades—how did I ever become a writer anyway?—I longed for those
endless days of July and August. Classes were boring, the days were
shorter and grayer, and life generally sucked moose.

Eventually I dreaded Labor Day. Even today it makes me uneasy.

In tenth grade at Canarsie High School, I was the founder and
only member of SPONGE, the Society for the Prevention of Negroes
Getting Everything. To avoid fights, I kept that pretty much to myself.

The first semester of eleventh grade English, I never bothered to read Huckleberry Finn because
Miss Shapin introduced it by reverentially reading aloud from the
book’s opening and humming "NNnnn" when she came to the racial slur.

 

When she assigned us a book report on an autobiography, I wrote about My Shadow Ran Fast, by
a white ex-convict I’d seen interviewed on the Mike Douglas show. She
gave me an F and said, "You should have selected a more admirable
person."

 

I found it interesting that Miss Shapin’s name described her
body. She should have failed me that term, but somehow I passed with a
65 after handing in an essay about my grandmother’s manicotti.

 

As a writer, I have always lucked out.