Selected Stories
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- €15.99
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- €15.99
Publisher Description
Dubus’s selected works—now available as an ebook
Twenty-three of the best stories by one of America’s finest practitioners of short fiction
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 human just as we are human, and their fates not so unlike our own.
The short stories and novellas compiled here represent the best work of one of our most accomplished and acutely sensitive authors, and make up 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.
“Dubus’s characters resemble those of Raymond Carver . . . but the stories stand alone in their idiosyncratic spiritual cast, occasionally religious, more often expressive of devotion to the people he lives among.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Dubus is the sort of writer who instructs the heart, and he ought to be discovered by any number of readers.” —The Atlantic Monthly
Award-winning author Andre Dubus (1936–1999) has been hailed as one of the best American short story writers of the twentieth century. Dubus’s collections of short fiction include Separate Flights (1975), Adultery & Other Choices (1977), and Dancing After Hours (1996), which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. Another collection, Finding a Girl in America, features the story “Killings,” which was adapted into the critically acclaimed film In the Bedroom (2001), starring Sissy Spacek, Tom Wilkinson, and Marisa Tomei.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Dubus, known as one of our most accomplished storytellers, has in his own life recently experienced some of the terrible things that customarily happen in his fiction (last year a car accident cost him a leg). In this fine collection of 23 stories, an iron-pumping hothead terrorizes and rapes his ex-wife; (``The Pretty Girl''); a sadistic Marine sergeant destroys a green recruit; (``Cadence''); a drunken youth kicks his girlfriend to death and leaves her body in the snow. (``Townies''). ``New Hampshire is also a redneck state,'' observes one character. Yet the disorderly lives of these small-town or suburban denizens are rendered in a calm, richly textured, minutely detailed style. Dubus gets under the skin of a 19-year-old baseball pitcher whose wife ditches him for her dentist, a waitress emotionally scarred by her husband's death in Korea, an obese woman who rationalizes her secret gorging on sweets, a divorcing disc jockey coming to terms with his misogyny. Many of these tales are set in his favorite fictional territory northwest of Boston, yet an equal number span the map from Virginia to Texas to California. With unflinching candor Dubus explores the uneasy accommodations of marriage and adultery, the self-deceptions of middle age and the terrors of childhood.
