Andre Dubus

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...

"Daniel Ahearn lives a quiet, solitary existence in a seaside New England town. Forty years ago, following a shocking act of impulsive violence on his part, his daughter, Susan, was ripped from his arms by police. Now in her forties, Susan still suffers from the trauma of a night she doesn't remember, as she struggles to feel settled, to love a man and create something that lasts. Lois, her maternal grandmother who raised her, tries to find peace...

After their parents divorce in the 1970's, Andre Dubus III and his three siblings grew up with their exhausted working mother in a depressed Massachusetts mill town saturated with drugs and crime. To protect himself and those he loved from street violence, Andre learned to use his fists so well that he was even scared of himself. He was on a fast track to getting killed, or killing someone else, or to beatings-for-pay as a boxer. Nearby, his father,...

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...

"The collection includes the novella "We Don't Live Here Anymore," which served as the basis for the 2004 film of the same title (nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival); the novella also introduces Dubus's writer-protagonist Hank Allison, a character who continue to appear throughout his work. While the collection's opening stories focus on the fragile nature of youth, later stories shift to darker struggles of adulthood,...

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.

Kathy gets evicted from her home for failing to pay a tax she never should have been charged to pay in the first place. The house is swiftly put up for auction and bought by a former military officer from Iran named Behrani. When legal efforts fail her, Kathy turns to a sympathetic cop who wants out of a loveless marriage and who is willing to step over legal boundaries if it might give him the fresh start he is so badly craving.