Most Popular Books by Andre Dubus III

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.

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.

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.

"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).

“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.

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.

"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.

A working-class white man takes a terrible fall. Tom Lowe’s identity and his pride are invested in the work he does with his back and his hands. He designed and built his family’s dream home, working extra hours to pay off the adjustable rate mortgage he took on the property, convinced he is making every sacrifice for the happiness of his wife and son. Until, in a moment of fatigued inattention, shingling a roof in too-bright sunlight, he falls. In constant pain, addicted to painkillers at the cost of his relationships with his wife and son, Tom slowly comes to realize that he can never work again. If he is not a working man, who is he? He is not, he believes, the kind of person who lives in subsidized housing, though that is where he has ended up. He is not the kind of person who hatches a scheme to commit convenience-check fraud, together with neighbors he considers lowlifes, until he finds himself stealing his banker’s trash. Who is Tom Lowe, and who will he become? Can he find a way to reunite hands and heart, mind and spirit, to be once again a giver and not just a taker, to forge a self-acceptance deeper than pride? Andre Dubus III’s soulful cast includes Trina, the struggling mom next door who sells her own plasma to get by; Dawn, the tough-talking owner of the local hairdressing salon; Jamie, a well-meaning pothead college student ready to stick it to “the man”; and a mix of strangers and neighbors who will never know the role they played in changing a life. To one man’s painful moral journey, Dubus brings compassion with an edge of dark absurdity, forging a novel as absorbing as it is profound.

Voilà quarante ans que Daniel Ahearn n’a pas revu sa fille, Susan. C’était au milieu des années 1970, Susan était encore toute petite, et il venait de tuer sa mère sous ses yeux... Aujourd’hui sexagénaire, alors qu’il sait que ses jours sont comptés, Daniel entreprend un long périple au volant de son pickup pour lui rendre une ultime visite. Il voudrait juste lui prouver qu’il n’est pas l’homme qu’elle imagine et lui laisser un modeste héritage. Mais a-t-il seulement le droit de faire irruption dans sa vie après une si longue absence ? Certains actes ne sont-ils pas impardonnables et inexpiables ? Andre Dubus III livre un roman bouleversant sur la culpabilité et le regret, la peur et la compassion, la colère et l’amour.

Daniel Ahearn vive un’esistenza silenziosa in una cittadina della costa del New England. Quarant’anni prima, a seguito di un suo sconcertante impulso violento, la figlia Susan gli è stata strappata dalle braccia dalla polizia. Susan ora è una donna che soffre del trauma di una notte che non ricorda e lotta per trovare una stabilità, per trovare la forza di amare un uomo e creare finalmente qualcosa. Lois, la nonna materna che l’ha cresciuta, cerca di ritrovare pace nel suo negozio antiquario, in una pittoresca cittadina della Florida, ma non riesce a sfuggire alla sua stessa rabbia, all’amarezza e alla paura. Catartico, intenso e pieno di quell’empatia e di quelle annotazioni di carattere per le quali Dubus è celebrato negli Stati Uniti come in Italia, È passato tanto tempo esplora come le ferite del passato disegnino ciò che siamo diventati e indaga i limiti del riscatto e del perdono.