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"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).
When Kathy, a young recovering alcoholic recently separated from her husband, fails to a open a series of tax letters that have been sent to her in error, the State of California seizes the house she and her brother have inherited from her father. The State sells the house at auction to Behrani, a former Iranian Air Force officer.
A collection of short stories examining the lives of suburbanites seeking solace and gratification in food, sex, work, and love.
"Dubus relives, absent self-pity or blame, a life shaped by bouts of violence and flurries of tenderness." —Vanity Fair After their parents divorced in the 1970s, Andre Dubus III and his three siblings grew up with their overworked mother in a depressed Massachusetts mill town saturated with drugs and everyday violence. Nearby, his father, an eminent author, taught on a college campus and took the kids out on Sundays. The clash between town and gown, between the hard drinking, drugging, and fighting of "townies" and the ambitions of students debating books and ideas, couldn’t have been more stark. In this unforgettable memoir, acclaimed novelist Dubus shows us how he escaped the cycle of violence and found empathy in channeling the stories of others—bridging, in the process, the rift between his father and himself.
One early September night, at the moment before the world changes, a young woman brings her daughter to work. April's usual babysitter, Jean, has had a panic attack that's landed her in hospital. April doesn't really know anyone else, so decides it's best to have her three-year-old daughter close by, watching children's videos in the office, while she works. But April is a stripper at the Puma Club for Men. And tonight she has an unusual client, a foreigner both remote and too personal, and free with his cash. His name is Bassam. Meanwhile, another man, AJ, has been thrown out of the club for holding hands with his favourite stripper, and he's drunk and angry and lonely. From these explosive...
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.
With House of Sand and Fog, his National Book Award-nominated novel, Andre Dubus III demonstrated his mastery of the complexities of character and desire. In this earlier novel he captures a roiling time in American history and the coming-of-age of a boy who must decide between desire, ambition, and duty. In the summer of 1967, Leo Suther has one more year of high school to finish and a lot more to learn. He's in love with the beautiful Allie Donovan who introduces him to her father, Chick — a construction foreman and avowed Communist. Soon Leo finds himself in the midst of a consuming love affair and an intense testing of his political values. Chick's passionate views challenge Leo's perspective on the escalating Vietnam conflict and on just where he stands in relation to the new people in his life. Throughout his — and the nation's — unforgettable "summer of love," Leo is learning the language of the blues, which seem to speak to the mourning he feels for his dead mother, his occasionally distant father, and the youth which is fast giving way to manhood.
An edgy and ambitious debut by a powerful new voice in contemporary literary fiction Monday, Kierk wakes up. Once a rising star in neuroscience, Kierk Suren is now homeless, broken by his all-consuming quest to find a scientific theory of consciousness. But when he’s offered a spot in a prestigious postdoctoral program, he decides to rejoin society and vows not to self-destruct again. Instead of focusing on his work, however, Kierk becomes obsessed with another project—investigating the sudden and suspicious death of a colleague. As his search for truth brings him closer to Carmen Green, another postdoc, their list of suspects grows, along with the sense that something sinister may be ha...
Andre Dubus is celebrated for his ability to depict the subtlest of human emotions in his characters, and when he turns to nonfiction, the resulting insights are no less illuminative. Especially moving are his descriptions of his children, his wrenching account of the 1986 automobile accident that cost him his leg, and of the ensuing struggle for his spiritual and physical survival. Broken Vessels is a book that, in its scope and sympathy, its grace and courage, never fails to startle with the sudden impact of quiet truths, passionately felt and powerfully expressed.
Longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, the stories in What Isn't Remembered explore the burden, the power, and the nature of love between people who often feel misplaced and estranged from their deepest selves and the world, where they cannot find a home. The characters yearn not only to redefine themselves and rebuild their relationships but also to recover lost loves--a parent, a child, a friend, a spouse, a partner. A young man longs for his mother's love while grieving the loss of his older brother. A mother's affair sabotages her relationship with her daughter, causing a lifelong ...