Most Popular Books by Andre Dubus

The National Book Award finalist, Oprah''s Book Club pick, #1 New York Times bestseller, and basis for the Oscar-nominated motion picture. A recent immigrant from the Middle East—a former colonel in the Iranian Air Force—yearns to restore his family''s dignity in California. A recovering alcoholic and addict down on her luck struggles to hold onto the one thing she has left—her home. And her lover, a married cop, is driven to extremes to win her love. Andre Dubus III''s unforgettable characters—people with ordinary flaws, looking for a small piece of ground to stand on—careen toward inevitable conflict. Their tragedy paints a shockingly true picture of the country we live in today.

Dubus’s fourth collection is a compassionate depiction of lives that are never as neat as his characters would have them be In his fourth collection, Andre Dubus revisits the themes of infidelity and fallibility that he has been known to explore with such unflinching honesty and unfailing respect. Set in the New England landscape and populated by the men and women he has come to claim as his own, these stories are ultimately characterized by their extraordinary ordinariness. They are a reverent testament to the quiet sadness of humble lives. Deeply moving and insightful, The Times Are Never So Bad is yet another masterful work by a writer whose Chekhovian sensibilities inform—yet never distract from—his own fully realized perspective. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Andre Dubus including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s estate.

The third heartbreaking collection of short stories from the acclaimed master who is “here not to offer comfort but truth” (The New Yorker). The ominous tone of this exquisite collection is established at its onset, as a bereaved father stalks the man who murdered his son. Three stories later, a college student suffers a violent death at the hands of her boyfriend. And in later episodes, relationships falter and fail, not all fatalities being of the flesh. Featuring some of the Dubus canon’s most haunting narratives, Finding a Girl in America is a remarkable lesson in the depiction of the darker side of human nature. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Andre Dubus including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s estate.

From the acclaimed author of ‘A Father’s Story’: A boy looks to the Catholic Church for understanding as his family weathers two failed marriages. Voices from the Moon opens amidst the fallout of Stowe family patriarch Greg’s divorce from his wife, Joan; and shortly after, that of their eldest son, Larry, from his wife, Brenda. On the verge of adolescence, young Richie Stowe grapples to make sense of these events and their consequences, and seeks solace in the church. As the family attempts to mend itself and move forward, its members are forced to reconcile their feelings of betrayal with their enduring love for one another. Masterfully related from the alternating perspectives of its six main characters, Dubus’s richly drawn novella recounts a family’s failure to abide by those laws divined and decreed, and its path to redemption via understanding and forgiveness. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Andre Dubus including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s estate.

Twenty-three unforgettable short stories from one of America’s most celebrated literary masters. John Updike once said of his friend and fellow writer Andre Dubus: “[He] is a shrewd student of people who come to accept pain as a fair price for pleasure, and to view right and wrong as a matter of degree.” Dubus’s characters are depicted in all their imperfection, but with the author’s requisite tenderness and compassion. After all, they are just as human as we are, and there is much to learn from their complicated, tragic, irrepressible lives. Including such acclaimed masterworks as ‘A Father’s Story’, ‘Townies’, ‘The Winter Father’, and ‘Killings’, the short stories and novellas compiled here represent the best work of one of our most accomplished and acutely sensitive authors. Dubus’s Selected Stories is an anthology unmatched in its collective portrayal of the human condition. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Andre Dubus including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s estate.

This first collection, from one of the most celebrated masters of the form, “restores faith in the survival of the short story” (Los Angeles Times). For the men and women in Andre Dubus’s poignant debut collection, life and love are not without their tribulations. The devout endeavor to reconcile the demands of their faith with their most basic human inclinations. A doctor is confronted with his limitations as a man. Husbands and wives seek solace in the beds of others, even as their infidelities expose them to further heartbreak. Etched in austere prose that is punctuated with powerful emotional moments, the richly drawn characters of Separate Flights command both compassion and admiration. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Andre Dubus including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s estate.

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year From a genuine hero of the American short story comes a luminous collection that reveals the seams of hurt, courage, and tenderness that run through the bedrock of contemporary American life. In these fourteen stories, Dubus depicts ordinary men and women confronting injury and loneliness, the lack of love and the terror of actually having it. Out of his characters'' struggles and small failures--and their unexpected moments of redemption--Dubus creates fiction that bears comparison to the short story''s greatest creators--Chekhov, Raymond Carver, Flannery O''Connor.

The twenty-five luminous and intensely personal essays in this collection are, like Andre Dubus''s celebrated short stories, a testament to the author''s vulnerability, vision, and indestructible faith. Since losing one leg and the use of the other in a 1986 accident, Dubus has experienced despair, learned acceptance, and, finally, found joy in the sacramental magic of even the most quotidian tasks. Whether he is writing of the relationship with his father, the rape of his beloved sister, his Catholic faith, the suicide of a gay naval officer, his admiration for fellow writers like Hemingway and Mailer, or the simple act of making sandwiches for his daughters'' lunchboxes, Dubus cuts straight to the heart of things. Here we have a master at the height of his powers, an artist whose work "is suffused with grace, bathed in a kind of spiritual glow" (The New York Times Book Review).

This “haunting and subtle” collection of short stories offers a compassionate portrayal of man’s journey from childhood to maturity (Publishers Weekly). For the adolescents in Part One of Andre Dubus’s Adultery & Other Choices, youth is characterized by humiliation, alienation, and disappointment: A son struggles to connect with his distant father, and later he must overcome a schoolyard bully. Then, for the soldiers that inhabit Part Two, service is synonymous with sacrifice, as marriages and limbs falter and fail. But for the bitterly lonely wife of a promiscuous professor, a hopeless affair with a dying ex-priest provides her with the strength necessary to retake control of her life. In the aptly titled follow-up to Separate Flights, Dubus expertly traces the arc of human life, and honors the men and women he portrays with such faithful veracity. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Andre Dubus including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s estate.

I''ve never read a better or more serious meditation on violence, its sources, consequences, and, especially, its terrifying pleasures, than "Townie." It''s a brutal and, yes, thrilling memoir that sheds real light on the creative process of two of our best writers, Andre Dubus III and his famous, much revered father. You''ll never read the work of either man in quite the same way afterward. You may not view the world in quite the same way either.--Richard Russo, author of "Empire Falls."

“This may be the best book you’ll read in years.” —Bill Heavey, Wall Street Journal From the literary master and best-selling author of Townie, reflections on a life of challenges, contradictions, and fulfillments. During childhood summers in Louisiana, Andre Dubus III’s grandfather taught him that men’s work is hard. As an adult, whether tracking down a drug lord in Mexico as a bounty hunter or grappling with privilege while living with a rich girlfriend in New York City, Dubus worked—at being a better worker and a better human being. In Ghost Dogs, Dubus’s nonfiction prowess is on full display in his retelling of his own successes, failures, triumphs, and pain. In his longest essay, “If I Owned a Gun,” Dubus reflects on the empowerment and shame he felt in keeping a gun, and his decision, ultimately, to give it up. Elsewhere, he writes of a violent youth and of settled domesticity and fatherhood, about the omnipresent expectations and contradictions of masculinity, about the things writers remember and those they forget. Drawing upon kindred literary spirits from Rilke to Rumi to Tim O’Brien, Ghost Dogs renders moments of personal revelation with emotional generosity and stylistic grace, ultimately standing as essential witness and testimony to the art of the essay.

Interviews with the author of Adultery and Other Choices, In the Bedroom, and The Last Worthless Evening

A tour de force collection from an American master of short fiction—“its emotional heartbeat is so insistently truthful” (The New York Times). In his fifth collection of short fiction, Andre Dubus exhibits his remarkable storytelling range. In “Deaths at Sea,” two naval officers, one black and one white, must come to terms with a history and an institution steeped in racism. “After the Game” tells the story of a Hispanic shortstop on a major-league baseball team who suddenly and without explanation loses his mind. And in “Rose,” a mother finally stands up to her husband’s abuse of their children. The four novellas and two short stories that comprise The Last Worthless Evening traverse those facets of American life that are at the same time cruel and commonplace, and with spare, immediate prose, render them universal. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Andre Dubus including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s estate.

A breaved father stalks his son''s killer. A woman cries alone by her television screen. A devout teenager wrestles with his faith and sexuality. Here, in these twenty-three stories, Andre Dubus turns fiction into an act of compassion. For readers new to Dubus, this is the perfect starting point. For fans of his, this is an essential, must-have collection.

The reflective essays of one of America’s most accomplished authors. Andre Dubus is celebrated for depicting the subtlest of human emotions and finding compassion for the most damaged, and damaging, of characters. In the essays collected here, the author turns the microscope on himself, and the results are no less illuminating. Intimate and evocative, these autobiographical accounts of his childhood in Louisiana, his experiences in the Marine Corps, and, later, his life as a husband and father, paint a vivid portrait of this acclaimed author. Written with the sapience and depth of feeling that made his reputation in fiction, Broken Vessels is perhaps Dubus’s most intimate work of all. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Andre Dubus including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s estate.

"Taut with tension.… [E]nding with a hint of hope."—Rob Merrill, Associated Press Cathartic, affirming, and steeped in the empathy and precise observations of character for which Dubus is celebrated, Gone So Long explores how the wounds of the past afflict the people we become. Gone So Long is a riveting family drama about an ex-con who did time for murder, the estranged daughter he hasn’t seen in forty years, and the grandmother angry enough to kill him. A profound exploration of the struggle between the selves we wish to be, and the ones—shaped by chance and circumstance, as well as character—that we can’t escape, it confirms Andre Dubus’s reputation as a novelist whose “compassion is unsentimental and unblinking, total and unwavering” (Paul Harding).

In this heartbreakingly beautiful book of disillusioned intimacy and persistent yearning, beloved and celebrated author Andre Dubus III explores the bottomless needs and stubborn weaknesses of people seeking gratification in food and sex, work and love. In these linked novellas in which characters walk out the back door of one story and into the next, love is "dirty"—tangled up with need, power, boredom, ego, fear, and fantasy. On the Massachusetts coast north of Boston, a controlling manager, Mark, discovers his wife''s infidelity after twenty-five years of marriage. An overweight young woman, Marla, gains a romantic partner but loses her innocence. A philandering bartender/aspiring poet, Robert, betrays his pregnant wife. And in the stunning title novella, a teenage girl named Devon, fleeing a dirty image of her posted online, seeks respect in the eyes of her widowed great-uncle Francis and of an Iraq vet she’s met surfing the Web. Slivered by happiness and discontent, aging and death, but also persistent hope and forgiveness, these beautifully wrought narratives express extraordinary tenderness toward human beings, our vulnerable hearts and bodies, our fulfilling and unfulfilling lives alone and with others.

The seven stories collected here–including “Killings,” the basis for Todd Field’s award-winning film In the Bedroom–showcase legendary writer Andre Dubus’s sheer narrative mastery in a book of quietly staggering emotional power. A father in mourning contemplates the unthinkable as the only way to allay his grief. A boy must learn to care for his younger brother when their mother leaves the family. A young woman who has never lacked lovers despairs of ever finding love itself, and then makes an accidental discovery that brings her real joy. Culled from Dubus’s treasured collections Selected Stories and Dancing After Hours, these beautiful stories of people at pivotal moments in their lives are some of the most bewitching and profound in American fiction.

Explosive elements converge one early September night in a Florida men''s club revealing the seamy underside of American life at the moment before the world changed.

Passion and betrayal, violent desperation, ambivalent love that hinges on hatred, and the quest for acceptance by those who stand on the edge of society-these are the hard-hitting themes of a stunningly crafted first collection of stories by the bestselling author of House of Sand and Fog. A vigilant young man working in a halfway house finds himself unable to defend against the rage of one of the inmates in the title story. In "White Trees, Hammer Moon," a man soon to leave home for prison finds himself as unprepared for a family camping trip in the mountains of New Hampshire as he has been for most things in his life. And in the award-winning "Forky," an ex-con is haunted by the punishment he receives just as he is being released into the world. With an incisive ability to inhabit the lives of his characters, Dubus travels deep into the heart of the elusive American dream.

A working-class white man takes a terrible fall.

A Vintage Shorts “Short Story Month” Selection The colonel had served in two wars with the Marines, without being injured. Then, at home, he breaks both legs falling off a horse, and learns that his knees will never fully recover. Together with his wife, he will have to relearn everything, all over again. “The Colonel’s Wife” is the moving story of a man and his wife, the woman for whom, when he met her for the first time, he felt “that he was looking at the sun without burning his eyes.” A story of peace after war and the continued drama of real life. From Andre Dubus’s masterful and compassionate collection Dancing After Hours, a New York Times Notable Book. An eBook short.

“A gentle and winning” historical novel from the author of House of Sand and Fog and a “sympathetic and compassionate chronicler of ordinary lives” (Publishers Weekly). It is the summer of 1967 and Leo Suther is about to turn eighteen. This is the summer that everyone has something to teach Leo. His father warns him that “life can turn on a dime.” Allie, his girlfriend, wants to teach him about love. Her father, the local communist and civil rights organizer, lectures him on politics and carpentry. And Ryder, a family friend, wants to show Leo the magic of the harmonica—harp of the blues. However, when Leo’s life threatens to come unglued, it is his mother’s wisdom he turns to. Though she died before Leo was five, her voice lives on in her diaries and poems, testifying to the strength of her love for her husband and son—a love that can still, years later, offer consolation. “Dubus captures well those small, mundane moments upon which lives really turn, and he captures too the enthusiasms and confusions of adolescence confronting adulthood.” —Library Journal