Blues for Beginners · Stories and Obsessions
- Authors
- Podell, Judith
- Publisher
- Bacon Press Books
- Tags
- cigarettes , boyfriends , humor , sex , magic brownies , greenwich village , short stories , cats , washington dc , fall out shelters , roommates , group therapy , blues , quitting smoking , cancer , writing the blues , psychoanalysis , affairs
- Date
- 2013-01-15T00:00:00+00:00
- Size
- 0.11 MB
- Lang
- en
"One thing the blues ain't, is funny,” according to singer/songwriter Stephen Stills. But he never read Judith Podell’s Blues for Beginners: Stories and Other Obsessions. Working in the same tradition as Woody Allen, Grace Paley and Nora Ephron -- think stand-up comic as narrator -- Podell’s characters sing the blues about life, love and loss in ways that would be heartbreaking if they weren't so funny.
“The blues tells a story,” said bluesman John Lee Hooker. And that’s exactly what Podell does in this tightly written collection. The title story, “Blues for Beginners,” a riff on how to write the blues, struck such a familiar chord when it was originally published, it was instantly claimed by the world at large as something that somehow belonged to all of us. Throughout the other nine stories, Podell continues to hit all the right notes -- whether she’s writing about Greenwich Village in the 70s or Washington, DC in the 80s, group therapy, bad boyfriends or sex in a fallout shelter -- she takes us back to a time when first jobs, like first loves, weren’t how we were going to spend the rest of our lives.