In his first volume of nonfiction, short-story writer Dubus (The Last Worthless Thing, 1986, etc.) reveals the passions, struggles, and strengths underlying his art, life, and arduous recovery from personal tragedy. Sparing few of life's messy details and contradictions, these 22 deeply personal essays, dating from 1977 to 1990 and strongly reminiscent of the author's fictional themes, offer an unflinching view of one man's search for truth. In "Of Robin Hood and Womanhood," a childhood tendency toward "angelic devotion to the female" yields slowly to an effort "to see women as they are...creatures like me." "On Charon's Wharf" connects the mysteries of the Eucharist—"without touch, God is a monologue...he must touch and be touched"—to the dissolution of a marriage once words suffocate action. Here are the joys of writing and the frustrations of publishing (in five essays that move from childhood storytelling to a tribute to writer Richard Yates); the search for social justice ("The Judge and Other Snakes"); the pleasures and responsibilities of fatherhood (throughout). Here also are moments of shimmering lyricism, as in "Under the Lights," when a rare home-run ball hit by a Class C journeyman appears as "a bright and vanishing sphere of human possibility, soaring into the darkness beyond our vision." The last third of the book, a wrenching chronicle of loss and reaffirmation, deals with the highway accident that cost Dubus the use of his legs, the subsequent breakup of his third marriage, and the ensuing battle for physical and spiritual peace. We are left with a view of life as an overlapping sequence of stories, answering a "need to speak into the silence of mortality,"informed by the quest for connection, the "sacrament" of "shared ritual" so ably served by this collection. A beautifully written, moving, and altogether wonderful book.
Praise for Andre Dubus and the three-volume, Collected Short Stories & Novellas
“The three volumes reaffirm Dubus’s status as a master, as an unparalleled excavator of the heart and its pains, its longings, its errors, its thumping against the constant threat of grief, despair, and loneliness.”—Nina MacLaughlin, The Paris Review
“Dubus has been compared to Chekhov, and there is much that is apt in that. His collection restores faith in the survival of the short story.”—The Los Angeles Times
“All his work is informed by a quality rare in fiction: compassion.”—Philadelphia Inquirer
“Mr. 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; without moralizing, he suggests that their self-inflicted punishments are often worse that what a just court, or a just God, would decree.”—John Updike, The New Yorker
“Dubus is a patient, resourceful and profound writer who never gives in to convention—although his situations are our situations, and imminently recognizable. The great, addictive pleasure of reading him arises from our anticipation that he is always going to say something interesting.”— Richard Ford
“Andre Dubus’s brilliant stories are so full of compassion and humor, heartache and desire, violence and tenderness, that, reading them, it’s impossible not to see the most secret and shameful parts of our own lives reflected back at us. I can think of few writers whose stories are so profoundly moving that I find myself responding to them both viscerally and intellectually—sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, page by page. These beautiful new editions triumphantly showcase stories by one of the greatest writers America has ever produced.”— Molly Antopol, National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” Award winner
“…the language of [Dubus’s] stories is at the service of something outside itself … often we forget we are reading sentences but are put rather into more direct connection with the character’s thoughts and feelings.”—William Pritchard, The Boston Globe
“To enter the work of Dubus is to be hurtled inside a world so deeply that one knows these people immediately. He always delivers; bam! Story after story will blow you away; his honesty is terrifying and liberating. There is no one like him; he is inimitable.”— Elizabeth Strout
“That Andre Dubus is up there with the short story immortals now—Welty, Hemingway, Gallant—is indisputable. But read a Dubus story and you don’t think much about the brilliance of the craft because you’re too busy becoming immersed in the lives of his characters and you come to know them as you might your sister or your brother, your son or your daughter. He goes that deep into the souls of his people, and just when you think he can’t go deeper, a sentence will leave you shattered. Love was his great subject and to my mind few have explored love’s mysteries with as much generosity. Can one writer’s words make us more human? The words of Andre Dubus can—and do.”— Peter Orner, National Book Critics Circle Awards finalist
“He is the greater master of meaningful compression, in which a whole novel is packed into a couple of sentences…”—Kirkus Reviews
“For the lyricism and directness of his language, the richness and precision of his observation, he is among the best short-story writers in America.”—Judith Levine, The Village Voice
“In each surprising tale, Dubus, equally empathic in portraying women and men, tackles with supreme candor precision, artistry, and valor the full emotional and moral weight of love, marriage adultery, friendship, parenthood, ambition, selfishness, and loneliness, subtly critiquing the social mores versus questions of self and faith.”—Booklist, starred review
“Dubus is interested in essential things—in the shadowy powers that circle our lives and the slender resources of faith and love with which we try to keep them at bay.”—Tobias Wolff
“Dubus is good — so good in fact that if [this is] your introduction to his work, you’re apt to wonder where he’s been hiding.”—Washington Post
“…the appearance of these stories in book form is an event . . . you will certainly want to keep it and read it again.”—Chicago Tribune
