The Written Nerd

Apparently no more than five minutes before I arrived at the bookstore for my shift yesterday, George Saunders ( The Braindead Megaphone ) was sitting in my office chair, talking on my phone, doing the pre-interview for his gig on Letterman. You can see a video clip of the show here (thanks to Ed for the link.) He was gone before I got there. But the day wasn't a total loss. A couple of hours later Junot Diaz stopped by to sign stock of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao before his big reading uptown that night (thanks to Richard Grayson for the write-up), and he kissed me on the cheek not once, but twice. And in the evening Edward P. Jones was in the store, fresh from an interview on Leonard Lopate (thanks to Maud for the link) to introduce writers from the anthology he just edited, New Stories from the South 2007 . Just one of those days, I guess.

Richard Grayson is the real thing: born and raised in Brooklyn, he's equally at home in the old neighborhood and the hipster revival. His name may be new to you, but he's been writing fiction and nonfiction since the 1970s, and he often writes about current literary events in New York on his MySpace blog . I'm grateful that he followed up on our earlier email correspondence by writing about his memories of the bookstores of Brooklyn; his knowledge of the borough, and his love for it, is deep and wide. Brooklyn Lit Life Interview Richard Grayson Describe your particular literary project, and your role in it. I’ve been writing stories since the early 1970s. They’ve been collected, rather haphazardly, into various books, but I never intended to write any books. My first three books, published in the late 1970s and early 1980s, were all the result of publishers contacting me, taking all the stories I sent them, and working them into collections. Later books were published ...