New Releases 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.

«Por la mañana me desperté sintiéndome como si la tierra estuviera bendecida, como si estuviéramos en un lugar sagrado. Tenía veintidós años y pensé en morir; todavía parecía que faltaban muchos años, pero me sentía más cerca, como si pudiera ver el resto de mi vida en esa tienda mientras Polly dormía, y no me hubiera importado morir.» Hay algo especial en la forma de escribir de Dubus; a menudo, sus historias pueden parecer banales, pero, según avanza la narración, lo que parece simple y común acaba iluminando las zonas grises del alma. Sus personajes se sienten culpables, lo esconden, actúan o no actúan, se avergüenzan de sí mismos, tienen miedo de su familia y de sus amantes, de su Dios, de ellos mismos, pero siempre intentan, con todas sus fuerzas, tener una buena vida con lo que se les da. Las acciones y los sentimientos de los protagonistas casi nunca van de la mano: experimentan miedo, ira, pérdida, pero también son capaces de conmoverse ante ciertos gestos sencillos, ciertas miradas, ciertos abrazos. Dubus escribe con una precisión y una tensión emocional que nunca decaen, con un poso duradero que deja al lector sumido en el extrañamiento y la indefensión.

“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.

A working-class white man takes a terrible fall.

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.

"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).

Andre Dubus''s short stories and novellas illuminate the lives of women and men cast against harrowing and heartrending circumstances. The gripping themes of Dubus''s uvre-faith and family, violence and loyalty, guilt and morality-have earned him comparisons to master storytellers such as Raymond Carver, Flannery O''Connor, and Anton Chekhov. With a deft touch, Dubus tackles nearly unspeakable subjects. Yet, without succumbing to sentimentality he imbues his characters with a quiet dignity in stories infused with an unerring belief that even the most complicated moments of our lives contain the possibility of grace. Dubus 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 ... continues to introduce us to ourselves, to see into the private worlds of everyday people as they live, dream and act, taking soundings that are deep and true. Book jacket.

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.

Dans la banlieue de San Francisco, une femme et un homme se livrent une guerre sans merci pour une petite maison. L''Américaine Kathy Lazaro a été expulsée de chez elle à la suite d''une erreur administrative kafkaïenne. Quant au colonel Behrani, c''est un Iranien ruiné par la révolution islamique. Ces deux exclus de la société souffrent et s''accrochent aux murs de la maisonnette comme à une bouée de sauvetage. La tragédie n''est pas loin... Encensé par la critique et le public, adapté au cinéma en 2002 avec Jennifer Connelly et Ben Kingsley dans les rôles principaux, ce livre au suspense psychologique hors pair dresse le portrait dur et violent d''un pays en proie à la névrose.

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.

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

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.