“It’s not easy to not dwell upon the past when your wife has recently died, forcing you and your 12-year-old daughter to relocate from your upstate New York home to a sublet in New York City’s Greenwich Village. And it’s especially hard when you think you keep seeing her ghost.”
“Fully realized characters, lyrical prose, gauzy apparitions—what more could anyone ask of this captivating novel that is ‘kind of a ghost story’? Nothing. I was charmed through and through.”
“I found Dangerous Blues to be a lovely, deft, profoundly confident book, a brief little blast of story that’s animated by grief and longing and a vision of a New York City that’s long gone. … this is a lovely book …”
“Policoff is a master of observation, of humanity’s frailties and foibles.”
“Stephen Policoff is so singular in so many ways ... as a seer of the ineffable, the unbearable, and the unexpectedly comedic ... a joy to know and to read. ”
A portion of the proceeds from Dangerous Blues will benefit the National Niemann-Pick Disease Foundation, a non-profit, patient advocacy and family support organization dedicated to supporting and empowering patients and families affected by Niemann-Pick disease, through education, collaboration and research.
Print ISBN: 979-8-9862459-0-4
eBook ISBN: 979-8-9862459-1-1
Publication date 11/1/2022
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About Dangerous Blues
Dangerous Blues explores a dark yet comic storm of family relationships laced with a buzz of the supernatural, where the fleeting light of the present must constantly contend with the shadows of the past.
Paul Brickner and his 12-year-old daughter Spring are subletting an apartment in New York City. They came to escape the sorrow of their empty house in upstate New York after Nadia, Paul’s wife and Spring’s mother, dies.
Spring quickly takes to her new Manhattan middle school life, including making a new friend, Irina. Through that connection, Paul meets Irina’s mother, Tara White, a blues singer, and perhaps just the spark Paul has been missing.
But Paul begins to fear that he is being haunted by Nadia, who appears to him in fleeting images. Is he imagining it, or is she real? Tara, who grew up in the inscrutable New England cult known as the Dream People, is haunted, too, hounded by her very real brothers to return to the family, and to give back the magical object—a shamanic Tibetan vessel—which they claim she stole from them.
Paul’s cousin Hank, a disreputable art dealer, becomes obsessed with this object. Meanwhile, Paul’s father-in-law, an expert on occult lore, tries to steer Paul toward resolution with Nadia’s ghost.
Driven by Paul’s new circle of odd and free spirited iconoclasts, Dangerous Blues asks the question: when do you let go, and what are you willing to let go of?
About the author
Stephen Policoff is the author of Beautiful Somewhere Else, which won the James Jones Award, and was published by Carroll & Graf. His second novel, Come Away, won the Dzanc Award, and was published by Dzanc Books in 2014. He was writer-in-residence at Medicine Show Theater Ensemble, with whom he wrote Shipping Out, The Mummer’s Play, Ubu Rides Again, and Bound to Rise, which received an Obie. He was also a freelance writer for Cosmopolitan, Ladies Home Journal, New Age Journal, and many other publications. He helped create Center for Creative Youth, based at Wesleyan University, and has taught writing at CUNY, Wesleyan, and Yale. He is currently Clinical Professor of Writing in Global Liberal Studies at NYU, where he has taught since 1987.
The story of Dangerous Blues in Necessary Fiction