Critics have classified Richard Grayson as a postmodern metafictionist, an experimentalist, a compulsive autobiographer, social critic, satirist, parodist, and stand-up comedian. For the past three decades, he has also been one of the most prolific and inventive practitioners of the short-story form, although only followers of the little-magazine scene know it. Grayson's fictional concerns include, but are not limited to, the project of fiction-making itself and the attendant commercial difficulties in an era when it is possible to ask the question that was the focus of a conference at Brooklyn College that Grayson coordinated: "Can publishing and literature co-exist"" The titles of Grayson's story collections reflect his preoccupation with self-reflexivity and the American pop culture of celebrities, fads, bumper stickers, and T-shirt slogans. Picking through the junk heap of American culture (television, teen magazines, Soap Opera Digest ) for his subjects, Grayson registers the effect of this commercial bombardment...