Dubus, Andre

Selected Stories

These twenty-three stories represent the best work of one of the finest and most emotionally revealing writers in America. Andre Dubus treats his characters--a bereaved father stalking his son's killer; a woman crying alone by her television late at night; a devout teenager writing in the coils of faith and sexuality; a father's story of limitless love for his daughter--with respect and compassion. He turns fiction into an act of witness. Books by Andre Dubus also in Vintage Contemporaries paperback: Dancing After Hours.



"Like some of the most satisfying storytellers of the past (Dubus has been compared to Chekhov), he is munificent, spinning out whole lifetimes and recounting events from many characters' viewpoints. For the lyricism and directness of his language, the richness and precision of his observations and the generosity of his vision, he is among the best."--Village Voice


"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."--New York Times Book Review

In the Bedroom

The seven stories collected here–including “Killings,” the basis for Todd Field’s award-winning film In the Bedroom–showcase legendary writer Andre Dubus’s sheer narrative mastery in a book of quietly staggering emotional power.

A father in mourning contemplates the unthinkable as the only way to allay his grief. A boy must learn to care for his younger brother when their mother leaves the family. A young woman who has never lacked lovers despairs of ever finding love itself, and then makes an accidental discovery that brings her real joy. Culled from Dubus’s treasured collections Selected Stories and Dancing After Hours, these beautiful stories of people at pivotal moments in their lives are some of the most bewitching and profound in American fiction.

Dancing After Hours: Stories

Over two decades, Andre Dubus has proven himself an essential American writer. "He restores faith in the survival of the short story" (Los Angeles Times), and now - with his first collection in nearly ten years - he demonstrates more powerfully than ever before both his mastery of the form and his understanding of our imperfect lives. In each of the fourteen stories in Dancing After Hours, Dubus uncovers the mystery of ordinary life as his characters - often perseverant, yet occasionally crazed by desire, loss, or disappointment - wrestle with love, faith, and luck. Whether at a roadside bar or a family camp, in the everyday rigors of domesticity or its violent extremes, these lives unfold with an inevitability that is moving, sometimes redemptive, always surprising.

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year

From a genuine hero of the American short story comes a luminous collection that reveals the seams of hurt, courage, and tenderness that run through the bedrock of contemporary American life. In these fourteen stories, Dubus depicts ordinary men and women confronting injury and loneliness, the lack of love and the terror of actually having it. Out of his characters' struggles and small failures--and their unexpected moments of redemption--Dubus creates fiction that bears comparison to the short story's greatest creators--Chekhov, Raymond Carver, Flannery O'Connor.



"A master of the short story...It's good to have Andre Dubus back. More than ever, he is an object of hope."--Philadelphia Inquirer


"Dubus's detailed creation of three-dimensional characters is propelled by his ability to turn a quiet but perfect phrase...[This] kind of writing raises gooseflesh of admiration."--San Francisco Chronicle

Meditations from a Movable Chair

In his first book of essays, Broken Vessels, Andre Dubus uses experiences such as baseball games and sheep herding as occasions for insight. His second essay collection, Meditations from a Movable Chair, is about the people who have meant the most to him. The book conjures a cloud of witnesses--Dubus's father, his sister, Norman Mailer, Liv Ullmann, a gay military officer--so vividly that their gifts to Dubus become gifts to the reader, as well. Many of these people helped Dubus understand the holiness, even sacramentality, of everyday life, which he describes in explicitly Catholic terms. Meditations from a Movable Chair is a rare and wonderful thing--a book written out of love, whose richness of heart is expressed by an exacting and challenging mind. --Michael Joseph Gross

The twenty-five luminous and intensely personal essays in this collection are, like Andre Dubus's celebrated short stories, a testament to the author's vulnerability, vision, and indestructible faith. Since losing one leg and the use of the other in a 1986 accident, Dubus has experienced despair, learned acceptance, and, finally, found joy in the sacramental magic of even the most quotidian tasks.
Whether he is writing of the relationship with his father, the rape of his beloved sister, his Catholic faith, the suicide of a gay naval officer, his admiration for fellow writers like Hemingway and Mailer, or the simple act of making sandwiches for his daughters' lunchboxes, Dubus cuts straight to the heart of things. Here we have a master at the height of his powers, an artist whose work "is suffused with grace, bathed in a kind of spiritual glow" (The New York Times Book Review).

Finding a Girl in America: A Novella and Ten Short Stories

In his third Godine collection, the author of Separate Flights (1975) and Adultery & Other Choices (1977) deepens his hold on our attention. His people, the ones we see everyday but hardly know, deliver those recurrent shocks of recognition that are the mark of a seasoned storyteller. His largely coastal New England world more and more feels like a permanent part of the modern literary landscape.

The novella, 'Finding a Girl in America,' continues the life of Hank Allison, a central character in Dubus' earlier long tales, 'We Don't Live Here Anymore' and 'Adultery.' Hank is a man haunted by his failures as a husband, his concern for his daughter, and his need for a new marriage that can survive his obsessive writer's absorption with himself.

Other stories including 'Killings,' a swift and wholly successful tale of revenge; 'Townies,' about a young man whose affair with an undergraduate girl ends in deadly fury; 'At Saint Croix,' the story of a man and woman, both divorced, whose Caribbean spring vacation fails to exorcise his ghosts; 'The Pitcher,' where a baseball player can manage his arm but not his wife; and 'The Winter Father,' a story of overwhelming tenderness dealing with a divorced father and his weekend attempts to re-establish contact with his two children.

Subtle and haunting, Dubus concentrates his Chekhovian and utterly American attention on the residual anguish and momentary elation of deep attachments. Nothing in current American writing seems more genuine that this increasingly celebrated writer's rueful and chastened fictions.

Broken Vessels

Broken Vessels, Andre Dubus's first collection of essays, was written between 1977 and 1990. During this period, Dubus hit his peak as an essayist, survived an accident that almost destroyed his will to write, and went on to regain and exceed his earlier power as a writer. Reading this book is almost as rich an experience as meeting a fascinating person: you'll learn the best way to scramble eggs, why baseball is a transcendental experience, the risks and rewards of idealistic poverty, and what it's like to see ghosts. Dubus writes as a Catholic, and most of his essays speak explicitly of the sacramental nature of his everyday experiences. Particularly effective are the essays describing Dubus's struggle to recover from a traffic accident that occurred after he stopped to help stranded motorists on a roadside in 1986. "Lights of the Long Night" is among the best of these, containing the kind of writing that makes you close the book immediately, knowing you've seen so deeply into a person's soul that you have to sit with what you've learned and wait for some sense of how to respond before you're entitled to keep turning the pages. --Michael Joseph Gross

Written between 1977 and 1990, universally acclaimed when they appeared in Godine hardcover, and exploring subjects close to home and close to the bone, these twenty-two diverse essays reveal the spiritual strength and shrewdly lyrical prose for which Andre Dubus has been recognized worldwide.

Personal but never indulgent, sensitive but never maudlin, these forays into Dubus's past and present conjure up small worlds: a Catholic boyhood in Cajun Louisiana, the transcendental quality of baseball, the luck and slipperiness of life, the precarious business of making a living by writing. These worlds are presented in a voice that is as powerful as it is poignant, that never flinches from the stark realities that have so colored Dubus's recent past and personal life. 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.

Broken Vessels: Essays

Adultery & Other Choices

This second book of short stories by Andre Dubus established him as a master of the genre in the lineage of Hemingway and Chekhov, even as its gritty truths and spiritual attentiveness served to set his voice apart. The opening stories focus on the fragile nature of youth, exemplified in struggles with a father, a friend, an enemy, and obesity. In part two, Dubus contends with more adult forms of discipline: the military, the police, and fate and then leaves us with the most wrenchingof all emotional challenges in the final novella, "Adultery." Poignant as parables, alive as fiction, and compelling as pure narrative, these familiar stories never fail to entertain while, at the same time, leaving the reader breathless with the immediacy and depth of real life in real America.

Dancing After Hours

Separate Flights

On its publication, SEPARATE FLIGHTS won the Boston Globe's Lawrence L. Winship Award as the outstanding book of New England origin. This Dubus sampler includes a novella and seven short stories. Themes range from violence and confrontation to tenderness and affection. To quote from the Los Angeles Times, "Dubus has been compared with Chekov...this collection restores faith in the survival of the short story."