Blues and Trouble: Twelve Stories

by Tom Piazza

Tom Piazza's short story collection Blues and Trouble, for which he won a James Michener Award, is the debut of an exciting and original new presence in American fiction. Set in Memphis, Florida, New York, New Orleans, and elsewhere, these twelve stories echo voices from Ernest Hemingway to Robert Johnson to Jimmie Rodgers in their powerful imagery and keen eye for the truth. A tough and haunting vision of a land where the social, emotional, and spiritual ground shifts constantly underfoot, Blues and Trouble is a work of both masterful craft and raw, rare beauty.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Southern

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

Reviews

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

A nice, brisk collection of short stories with themes that point out subtle hypocrisies and quirks that somehow could only be American. The stories are brief and have a rhythmic quality.

The best story was C.S.A., about a young Jewish northern couple who visit a downtrodden antiques store in Memphis run by two men, one white, one black. They also have a small selection of Confederate and Nazi memorabilia, which upsets the young woman when she sees it. Piazza packs eternal questions about race, religious, and generational relations into very few intense sentences. The story is a subtly explosive revelation demonstrating how what one sees sometimes has little to do with reality.

A good book for a flight or afternoon read.

[Dave · Rating 2 out of 5]

Tom Piazza is a wonderful writer. He's may be the best chronicler of New Orleans. He's an accomplished writer about jazz. Unfortunately, that talent does not carry over to short stories. From early in his career, these are uniformly undeveloped in plot and motivation and are based mostly on youthful wishful thinking about the human condition rather than a clear understanding of our weakness and foibles. It's interesting to read early writing of admired authors, so this was not a disappointing. It simply was not rewarding.

[Glen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection was a lot of fun to read, partly because the stories are so unpredictable, but also because of the author's ability to give voice to disparate characters whose only thing in common seems to be that they are at or near the end of their proverbial rope. Sometimes they find that they have a little more rope than they thought, as does the character in "Born Yesterday", others that they are running out faster than they thought, as does the main character in "Port Isabel Hurricane", and still others that whatever rope they might have had is all gone, as does the character in "Losing Hand". Many of the stories occur in Florida or the Gulf Coast, but my favorite story is "Memphis", featuring the character Luke Jackson whose business is in "the kind of area where you don't fall asleep with your mouth open unless you want to wake up with no teeth," who drinks too much, does drugs to stay straight, carries a gun for protection, and is desperately trying (and failing) to make a good impression on his girlfriend's parents: "Suzy was avoiding looking at me, like I had herpes of the eyeballs." Luke is a bit of a basket case and he knows it, but he doesn't blame anyone or want to take any hostages, he just figures that "learning how to be with someone was like leaving a trail of crumbs leading into the woods; the storm comes and blows the trail away, and next time you have to make the exact same mistakes." Sound like anyone you know? Yeah, me too.

[Tom Baker · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book for me, had some wonderful stories where the writing was spot on beautiful and plot line perfect. A few stories were impressionistic, almost stream-of conscious. These stories didn't do so much or end up solidly.

[Michael Alan Grapin · Rating 3 out of 5]

A book of unrelated short stories long on description but short on plot and resolution...only a couple of them held my interest...

[David Stine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Twelve stories/observations that are beautiful, frightening, and slap-your-face real. Tom is one of America's best writers.

[Al Kratz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good collection in the Denis Johnson Jesus’s Son space as far as loser down on luck kind of stories although this one branches out into a couple different types of characters occasionally.

[Lizz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Short stories, easy to pick up and put down again.

[Leslie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked almost every story in this collection. They're all pretty short, but nonetheless feel full-formed, evocative of a mood/place, and the characters are three-dimensional.