Home > Romance > Contemporary Romance > The Housewife Blues

$ 

Want this eBook?

Our Reader™ software is required to purchase and download eBooks. Download it here.Click here to purchase this book!

The Housewife Blues: A Psychological Thriller of Domestic Captivity In New York City

Overview

Returning to the turf of his best-selling "The War of the Roses, " Warren Adler explores the explosive consequences of another discordant marriage. A small town girl from the Midwest is carried away by her "Prince Charming" to the super-charged canyons of modern New York City. Warned by her uptight advertising executive husband to beware of strangers, the newlywed cannot repress her small town upbringing and instinctive innocence. She eventually befriends many of the offbeat and quirky tenants in her apartment building and enters into their complicated and sometimes tragic lives. Her journey of self-discovery from naivet through disenchantment and eventual wisdom makes for a suspenseful story of a young woman's inner turmoil and how culture shock can impact on deeply held values.

Author Information

Warren Adler

Warren Adler is a world-renowned novelist, short story writer and playwright. His books have been translated into more than 25 languages and two of his novels, The War of the Roses and Random Hearts, have been made into enormously popular movies, shown continually throughout the world.

Three short stories from his acclaimed collection The Sunset Gang have been adapted as a trilogy and shown on Public Television stations. The Overlook Press will publish a new novel, his 29th, in Spring 2008, and his fifth short story collection, New York Echoes will be published in late Winter of 2008 by Stonehouse Press. His play Libido is scheduled for an off-Broadway production in 2008. His stage adaptation of the novel The War of the Roses is currently being produced in Italy, Berlin, Hamburg, Prague and countries in Scandinavia.

Mr. Adler is a pioneer in electronic publishing and has acquired his complete backlist and converted this entire library to digital publishing formats. As a novelist, Mr. Adler's themes deal primarily with intimate human relationships--the mysterious nature of love and attraction, the fragile relationships between husbands and wives and parents and children, the corrupting power of money, the aging process and how families cling together when challenged by the outside world. Readers and reviewers have cited his books for their insight and wisdom in presenting and deciphering the complexities of contemporary life.


A product of the New York public school system, Mr. Adler graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School and New York University, where he majored in English literature. Inspired by his freshman English Professor Don Wolfe, Mr. Adler went on to study creative writing with Dr. Wolfe when he taught at the New School. He also studied under Dr. Charles Glicksburg at the New School.

Among his classmates were Mario Puzo, William Styron and many other talented writers. Two collections of short stories "American Vanguard" and "Which Grain Will Grow" were published by Doubleday and represented a showcase of many young emerging authors, who like Warren Adler, won both popular and critical acclaim.

"I wanted to be a novelist since I was fifteen years old," he says. "Throughout my early career, I would write from five to ten in the morning every day before going to my office, a habit that has stayed with me since."

After graduating from New York University with a degree in English literature, Mr. Adler worked for the New York Daily News before becoming Editor of the Queens Post, a prize winning weekly newspaper on Long Island. His column "Pepper on the Side" became a staple of a number of newspapers in the country.

During the Korean War, after basic training he was recruited by Armed Forces Press Service to serve in the Pentagon as the only Washington Correspondent for the service. His Washington by-line went all over the world and was published in every publication put out by the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force and Coast Guard.

Prior to his success as a novelist, Mr. Adler had a distinguished business career. He has owned four radio stations and a TV station, has run his own advertising and public relations agency in Washington, D.C. and was one of the founders with his wife Sonia and son David of the Washington Dossier magazine.

When his first novel was published in 1974, he became a full time novelist.

Today, when not writing, Mr. Adler lectures on creative writing, motion picture adaptation and the future of Electronic Books. He is the founder of the Jackson Hole Writer's Conference and has been Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Jackson Hole Public Library. He is married to the former Sonia Kline, a magazine editor. He has three sons, David, Jonathan and Michael and four grandchildren and lives in New York City.

Editorial Reviews

Plucked from the bosom of her Indiana family by a whirlwind marriage to a slick talker from a Manhattan ad agency, Jenny Burns is thrilled to move to New York to become a perfect housewife. Adler ( The War of the Roses ) plants tongue firmly in cheek as he sends his wide-eyed, corn-fed heroine up against the yuppie element. Although Jenny's husband, Larry, is a blustering prig who bawls her out for fraternizing with the neighbors, she soon becomes the midwestern Mother Teresa in their East Side brownstone, doling out meatloaf and oddly modest sexual favors, offering redemption to an impotent art dealer and a suicidal salesman and helping hush up an affair gone awry in the life of a brittle, chic Vanity Fair editor. Larry, meantime, wheels and deals and belittles his wife until her rose-colored vision of him fades. In this breezy, bitingly funny novel, Adler creates an adept lineup of New York types, such as Larry's unshaven, expensively rumpled business partner Vincent, who clash with Jenny's wholesome aura in a string of amusing, though predictable, scenes that build to a gratifying climax. (Sept.) -- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.

Customer Reviews

1931304661

Showing 1-1 of the 1 most recent reviews

  • 1.3 stars out of 5Review from
    GoodReads is a social reading site where members can share and review the books they're reading

    Posted November 13, 2011 by , Lake Placid, FL

  1. Previous 
  2. 1 
  3.  Next
  1. Previous 
  2. 1 
  3.  Next

Product Details

  • Published by

    Stonehouse Press

  • Publish Date

    July 18, 2004 

  • Print ISBN

    1931304661

  • eBook ISBN

    1590061985

  • Imprint

    Stonehouse Press

  • Filesize

    277.57 KB

  • Number of Print Pages*

    272

* Number of eBook pages may differ. Click here for more information.

Excerpt from The Housewife Blues by Warren Adler

IF SHE hadn't placed her great-great-grandmother?s spinet in that exact spot along the east wall and hadn?t set aside time to polish it on this particular April day, Jenny might have avoided any confrontation with this bit of unsavory information.

First there was Godfrey Richardson letting himself into the main hallway, which was unusual enough, since he was rarely at home during the middle of a weekday morning. She heard him climb the single flight of stairs to the apartment he shared with his wife, Terry, just above hers on the second floor. The Richardsons rarely used the tiny mahogany-paneled elevator, and she heard his ascending footfalls on the steps, not because she was deliberately listening, but probably because his tread was lighter than usual, as if he were walking on the tips of his toes.

She realized, of course, that she was conscious of the difference because it was out of the ordinary pattern of sound and activity of the weekday life of their building. In the two months that she and her husband, Larry, had lived there, she had discovered that she was usually the only tenant in residence on most days. A couple of the tenants had maids in for an hour or two a week, but they came and went with barely a ripple.

There were five apartments in their converted East Side Manhattan brownstone, and all of the tenants were normally off pursuing their various vocations during the day. As a housewife, Jenny, too, was pursuing her vocation, which she took as seriously as the others in the building took theirs.

Godfrey Richardson?s tiptoeing up the stairs, despite a rational dismissal of it as being none of her business, had alerted her to what followed. Looking out of the bay window through the lower branches of the budding sycamore tree that fronted the building, she had noted that a young woman had passed the building twice already, lingered in front of it briefly, looked up toward the Richardsons? apartment, then proceeded toward Second Avenue. She was now headed toward the building once again, this time coming from the Third Avenue side.

Jenny continued to apply polish to the spinet. She had it on her mental schedule to polish the heirloom once a week. This was exactly the way her mother had treated the spinet in their house in Indiana, and one of the conditions of the gift was that it be treated the same way in perpetuity. It had been purchased by her great-great-grandmother, handed down to each generation in turn, and had never left Indiana. So far it had fared quite well in its new Manhattan life, had not warped and had kept its tune, although she rarely played it.

Her concentration was deflected by this young woman parading in front of the window. The woman was no more than twenty and wore tight jeans, black cowboy boots, and a black leather jacket, which emphasized the fullness of her breasts. Hussy type, her mother might have said, but then her mother, like the spinet, had never been anywhere but Indiana. As a newly anointed Manhattanite, Jenny felt herself superior to such judgments.

With obviously contrived casualness, the woman stopped in front of the building, looked at her watch, then proceeded up the stone steps to the front entrance. When the woman could no longer be seen from the window, Jenny listened for the faint sound of the outside buzzer. Curiosity, she supposed, had made her hearing more acute than usual. She heard the return buzzer sound, then the door opening, and, after a short interval, the tiny elevator moving in the shaft, stopping on the floor above her.