The Silicon Valley Diet | 
 enlarge | Author: Richard Grayson
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
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Rating:  14 reviews
Sales Rank: 2894819
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1st
Pages: 192
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 7.8 x 5 x 0.5
ISBN: 1888996234
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN: 9781888996234
ASIN: 1888996234
Publication Date: May 15, 2000
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Condition: Brand new paperback. No marks, no scuffs, no creases, no tears. Gift quality. 24 hr shipping.
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Product Description
The bassist in a gay punk band reflects on his troubled relationship with the band's guitarist/singer. In the wake of the Matthew Shepard murder, a Wyoming ranch manager conceals his affair with another man. A young African American breaks up with his white boyfriend at a series of dinners at Cuban-Chinese restaurants. The attempt to repeal a gay rights ordinance divides a Southern college town. And in the title story, a downsized computer engineer tutors a gay Vietnamese immigrant in pop culture, cyberspace, and weight loss--only to learn a vital lesson about American life circa Y2K. Welcome to the world of Richard Grayson, the writer "Newsday" called "convulsively inventive" and "Kirkus Reviews" found "oddly charming." In "The Silicon Valley Diet," his ninth collection of short stories, Grayson zeroes in on gay baby boomers and Gen Xers making their way in a wired world.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 9 more reviews...
 Searching For A Complete Love Life October 20, 2003
Stephanie Murphy (UIC, Chicago, IL USA)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
In all of the twelve short stories contained in "The Silicon Valley Diet", the reader encounters men who range in age, as well as race, culture, sexual orientation, and insecurities. Being a straight white female raised Souther Baptist; I was a little apprehensive of reading such a new age type of book. However trying to identify with the characters was not as hard as I thought it would be. Grayson has a remarkable ability to let the reader feel as if he/she has known the characters for years, or at least encountered such affectionate characters in their lifetime.
Each story dealt with many problems that any relationship may encounter - lack of communication, different expectations, or even just being too different. But Grayson is able to make a profound statement about American culture: We are all searching for success in one way or the other, whether it be in love, work, or even body image; we are all searching for success in our life. The stories created within this book are just examples of the struggle different types of people have gone through to continue the search. I'm not sure I would recommend this book to my sixty year old grandmother, but for the more internet/pop culture savy singles that I know, I think this is considered a must read. It's a fun and very informative look into the love lives and games that gay men encounter while searching for completeness.
 Confusion October 13, 2003
Kerry Dunleavy (Chicago, IL USA)
"The incessant familiarity of the writer's secret self makes his world entertaining and bizarre. The dialogue is consistently, even ingeniously funny" (The New York Times Book Review). Well, the only thing in this quote that I agree with is that his world is bizarre. Okay, it is entertaining also. But, there was nothing at all consistent about the dialogue. At some parts of the collection, I felt that there was a different speaker than the original point of view. For example, the last section from The Five Stages of Eating at Cuban-Chinese Restaurants. It seems as though only this section of the entry comes from Terence's point of view. Is this done on purpose or unintentionally? I found myself asking these types of questions throughout the entire collection of short stories. I became so worried about trying to find a hidden message or something along those lines, most likely due to the structure and sarcastic tone of the story, that I became even more confused. However, it is obvious that this author has a talent in writing familiarity. No matter how different a middle aged, gay man's world is from mine, I still felt a familiarity in his thoughts. Not a book that I would read every day. (...)
Worth the read March 10, 2003
Kristen Oye (Chicago, IL USA)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I really enjoyed this unique collection of short stories with an overall unifying theme--people and their wonderfully amusing idiosyncrasies. This quirky and slightly eccentric book is composed of twelve shorter pieces that make up the whole. As the narrator experiences each new love or each seemingly unrelated experience, he takes an inimitable approach to fitting all the pieces together. It reads like nonfiction, like a memoir of a [non straight] man's truly crazy existence as he moves from one place to another. The characters are so real and the situations so poignant that this is one book that can be read cover to cover in a single sitting. The author plays with some interesting techniques in a few of the stories like in "Moon Over Moldova" that I'm not sure worked quite the way they were supposed to. The story was interwoven with some jargin-layden paragraphs about the land of Moldova that seemed totally unrelated to the story itself (I ended up skipping most of them), but when the author stuck to the characters, he had a winning voice. One technique, that seemed to have named the book, involved a diet plan that the narrator was concocting,and amazingly enough, worked quite well. It also was a device to act as a metaphor for much of what the narrator said throughout the book and tied it all together. I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys a witty and intelligent narrator with some great stories to tell.
 An expansive view August 23, 2002
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The gay characters in this book are decidedly odd. Take Elihu and Kevin in Grayson's story "Salugi at Starbucks." They are fortyish Jewish-Americans from Brooklyn who e-mail each other. The narrative is told in alternating e-mail messages from Elihu, still in Brooklyn, only recently out to his parents, and first-person remembrances of Kevin, who's known Elihu ever since high school. Both are loners who seem unable to sustain committed relationships. Kevin is a perpetual graduate student who wanders from campus to campus while Elihu abandoned a college teaching career for relatively unimportant jobs on Wall Street.
Ostensibly, Kevin and Elihu tell the story of Elihu's meeting with Bud, a chef, on a trip to New Orleans and his preparations for Bud's moving into his Brooklyn Heights co-op. It eventually becomes clear, first to Kevin, and ultimately to Elihu, that Bud has been lying about moving to New York (and perhaps about everything in his life, from his job at Antoine's restaurant to his kid brother with AIDS in Austin). Kevin goes along with his friend's fantasy of preparing for Bud's arrival even as they both know deep down that the situation is merely a way for Elihu to combat the loneliness and emptiness in his life. When Kevin does meet Elihu at a Manhattan Starbucks after Elihu has learned he's been taken for a sucker (no pun intended), Kevin can't understand why Elihu isn't angry. Elihu replies that he's not angry because he's at least managed to occupy himself for months and besides, "I've got an interesting story to tell people."
Other stories in The Silicon Valley Diet feature relationships of white guys with Asian, black, or Latino would-be boyfriends. In three stories - "Spaghetti Language," "The Five Stages of Eating at Cuban-Chinese Restaurants," and "Those Old, Dark Sweet Songs," the narrator describes his affair with Terence, a young, somewhat flaky African American.
But Terence does not seem to be the same character in each of the stories. In "Spaghetti Language," he works in the men's clothing department at an Atlanta store who frowns when he sees a display of outfits, not because he doesn't like the clothes but because "I don't like the way they're lit." In "Cuban-Chinese Restaurants," Terence is still a Southerner, but the couple are in New York, having a series of breakups, never connecting in their sometimes hilarious non sequitur conversations. While the Cuban-Chinese restaurants they frequent may feature an easy mix of two disparate cuisines, it is clear that the unnamed narrator and Terence can't get past their different ways of looking at the world. The narrator tries to get Terence to see that his beloved nephew is not really his twin brother's son, that the baby is totally white, Terence - like Elihu in "Starbucks" - prefers his fantasy to harsh reality.
In "Songs," Terence is still the narrator's lover, still black, but he's a successful fashion designer; although their sex life ("light bondage") is great, a worldwide shortage of chocolate is the impetus for their impending breakup as the narrator compares his parents' lifelong love affair unfavorably with his inability to connect with Terence, who is obsessed with making money.
"Mysteries of Ranch Management," set in Wyoming soon after the Matthew Shepard murder, begins with the deliberatively provocative statement, "He never should have gotten into that truck with them," from Betty, the wheelchair-bound best friend of the narrator and sister of his closeted cowboy lover, Brant. The implication is that in a harsh homophobic culture, sensible gay men come out at their own peril, is disturbing, but the narrator and Brant settle for a low-key, easy-going secret relationship even though, as it is gingerly put, they are "sexually incompatible." If it's not even half a loaf, Grayson's narrator says, it's better to have "a slice of goddamn bread," especially in a place like Wyoming.
In the long title story, the narrator is another computer whiz kid who attempts to Americanize a recent Vietnamese immigrant he's met through a personals ad. His best friend and ex-boyfriend Andy Ishigura, an assimilated Japanese-American, who warns Justin that he is condescending to Duc when he suggests Duc change his name to Doug. Grayson's take on multiculturalism is never more interesting than in this story, which examines not only another failed gay relationship in which friendship ("buds") prevails over passion, but what it means to be an American in a society where Duc's Vietnamese little nephew comes home speaking Spanish because all the other kids at his day care center are Mexican. Set in a Silicon Valley where dot-com start-ups are still booming, the story nevertheless points out that not everyone in San Jose and San Francisco - particularly the Mexican and Vietnamese communities - are reaping the benefits of "the greatest legal concentration of wealth in the history of our planet." As in Shakespearean comedies, everyone is paired up at the end - Duc with another Vietnamese guy, Andy with the "flatliner" Mauricio ("what he lacks in bandwidth he makes up in inches," Andy remarks), and Justin with the half-Jewish, half-Asian Indian Jay, whose entire knowledge of his South Asian heritage "comes from reading the Kama Sutra and watching the movie Gandhi" - but these pairs are more or less imperfect, and by implication, doomed. "The Silicon Valley Diet" is not just the book Justin is writing - the diet is so ridiculously strict only an obsessive-compulsive could follow it - it hints at the limits of relationships in a digitalized world.
Grayson is a social critic disguised as a fiction writer, and that's presented in all of his stories, whether the tale of a memorial service for a childhood friend who died of AIDS ("Willie 95") or the gay punk rock scene ("Boys Club") or a graduate student's relationship with two gay activists, Javier and Bryan) in the course of an anti-gay referendum in a college town ("Moon Over Moldova"). Grayson has an expansive, funny, and heartbreaking view of this planet and the gay men and women who inhabit it.
Humorous critique of gay (and straight) people's lives June 17, 2001
Nadia Kalman Warner (Brooklyn, NY United States)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The stories in this volume show how difficult it is to be gay -- that is, to be a human being. The characters are basically all the same person: a bright, loquacious, ironic Aerican gay male who may be white or black, Asian or Hispanic, 22 or 42, who deals with society, family, and the culture of the mass media with humor, compassion, and a touch of self-pity. I liked the story about the gay punk rock band the best, but the story of the closeted gay cowboy ranch manager was also very affecting, especially in light of the fact that it takes place in Wyoming after Matthew Shepard's murder. The author seems to like women and old people, too -- or his characters do. A nice, pleasant read. I laughed aloud a few times, and it usually takes a lot to get me to do that.
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