Andre Dubus

The reflective essays of one of America's most accomplished authors. Andre Dubus is celebrated for his ability to depict the subtlest of human emotions in his characters, and when he turns the microscope on himself, the resulting insights are no less illuminative. Intimate and expressive, 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...

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...

Dubus's second collection of short fiction: a compassionate portrayal of man's journey from childhood to maturity. For the adolescents in Part One of Andre Dubus's Adultery & Other Choices, youth is characterized by humiliation, alienation, and disappointment: A son struggles to connect with his distant father, and later he must overcome a schoolyard bully. Then, for the soldiers that inhabit Part Two, service is synonymous with sacrifice, as marriages...

In his third collection, Andre Dubus plumbs the dark depths of the human condition. 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...

While the title novella of Dubus' Finding a Girl in America returns to the somewhat off-the-rails literary life of Hank Allison, the collection's opening story strikes a much darker tone: "Killings"-the basis of the Academy Award-nominated film In the Bedroom-is a swift tale of revenge that leaves readers wondering what they might do in the name of family love. Dubus' prowess with narrative compression is on full display in the story "Waiting": the...

In the early 1970s, literary journals that contained Andre Dubus' short stories were passed around among admiring readers. When his debut collection, Separate Flights, arrived in 1975, it was immediately celebrated and won the Boston Globe's Laurence L. & Thomas Winship / PEN New England Award. 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...

With House of Sand and Fog, his National Book Award-nominated novel, Andre Dubus III demonstrated his mastery of the complexities of character and desire. In this earlier novel he captures a roiling time in American history and the coming-of-age of a boy who must decide between desire, ambition, and duty. In the summer of 1967, Leo Suther has one more year of high school to finish and a lot more to learn. He's in love with the beautiful Allie Donovan...

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...