Andre Dubus III – författare

In his stunning follow-up to the #1 best-selling House of Sand and Fog, Andre Dubus draws us into the lives of three deeply flawed, driven people whose paths intersect on a September night in Florida. April, a stripper, has brought her daughter to work at the Puma Club for Men. There she encounters Bassam, a foreign client both remote and too personal, and free with his money. Meanwhile, another man, AJ, has been thrown out of the club, and he’s drunk and angry and lonely. From these explosive elements comes a relentless, raw, and page-turning narrative that seizes the reader by the throat with psychological tension, depth, and realism.

After their parents divorced in the 1970s, Andre Dubus III and his three siblings grew up with their overworked mother in a depressed Massachusetts mill town saturated with drugs and everyday violence. Nearby, his father, an eminent author, taught on a college campus and took the kids out on Sundays. The clash between town and gown, between the hard drinking, drugging, and fighting of "townies" and the ambitions of students debating books and ideas, couldn’t have been more stark. In this unforgettable memoir, acclaimed novelist Dubus shows us how he escaped the cycle of violence and found empathy in channeling the stories of others—bridging, in the process, the rift between his father and himself.

In these linked novellas in which characters walk out the back door of one story and into the next, love is "dirty"—tangled up with need, power, boredom, ego, fear, and fantasy. On the Massachusetts coast north of Boston, a controlling manager, Mark, discovers his wife's infidelity after twenty-five years of marriage. An overweight young woman, Marla, gains a romantic partner but loses her innocence. A philandering bartender/aspiring poet, Robert, betrays his pregnant wife. And in the stunning title novella, a teenage girl named Devon, fleeing a dirty image of her posted online, seeks respect in the eyes of her widowed great-uncle Francis and of an Iraq vet she’s met surfing the Web.Slivered by happiness and discontent, aging and death, but also persistent hope and forgiveness, these beautifully wrought narratives express extraordinary tenderness toward human beings, our vulnerable hearts and bodies, our fulfilling and unfulfilling lives alone and with others.

A recent immigrant from the Middle East—a former colonel in the Iranian Air Force—yearns to restore his family’s dignity in California. A recovering alcoholic and addict down on her luck struggles to hold onto the one thing she has left—her home. And her lover, a married cop, is driven to extremes to win her love.Andre Dubus III’s unforgettable characters—people with ordinary flaws, looking for a small piece of ground to stand on—careen toward inevitable conflict. Their tragedy paints a shockingly true picture of the country we live in today.

An ex- con who did time for murder, the estranged daughter he hasn’t seen in forty years and the grandmother angry enough to kill him all come together in this riveting family drama. Like Dubus’s already- classic memoir, Townie, and his novel House of Sand and Fog (a #1 The New York Times bestseller), Gone So Long is a profound exploration of the struggle between the selves we wish to be and the ones—shaped by chance and circumstance, as well as character—that we can’t escape.

Tom Lowe’s fall was catastrophic—a moment of fatigued inattention while shingling a roof leading to excruciating pain, opioid addiction, divorce and estrangement from his son. Yet Tom still considers himself a worker, unlike his shiftless neighbours in subsidised housing. And he resents the hell out of the banker and adjustable-rate mortgage responsible for foreclosure on the home he built himself.After his car is impounded, Tom stoops lower than he ever thought possible, with a scheme to commit convenience-check fraud. But in digging through literal trash, Tom finds that something new begins to grow: a recognition of common humanity, a self-acceptance deeper than pride, a determination to give what he can. Still, he’ll need to fall even farther before he finds a new place to rest. To one man’s painful moral journey, Andre Dubus III brings compassion with an edge of dark absurdity, forging a novel as absorbing as it is profound.

Tom Lowe’s fall was catastrophic—a moment of fatigued inattention while shingling a roof leading to excruciating pain, opioid addiction, divorce and estrangement from his son. Yet Tom still considers himself a worker, unlike his shiftless neighbours in subsidised housing. And he resents the hell out of the banker and adjustable-rate mortgage responsible for foreclosure on the home he built himself. After his car is impounded, Tom stoops lower than he ever thought possible, with a scheme to commit fraud. But in digging through literal trash, Tom finds that something new begins to grow: a recognition of common humanity, a self-acceptance deeper than pride, a determination to give what he can. Still, he’ll need to fall even further before he finds a new place to rest. To one man’s painful moral journey, Andre Dubus III brings compassion with an edge of dark absurdity, forging a novel as absorbing as it is profound.

During childhood summers in Louisiana, Andre Dubus III’s grandfather taught him that men’s work is hard. As an adult, whether tracking down a drug lord in Mexico as a bounty hunter or grappling with privilege while living with a rich girlfriend in New York City, Dubus worked—at being a better worker and a better human being.In Ghost Dogs, Dubus’s non-fiction prowess is on full display in his retelling of his own successes, failures, triumphs and pain. In his longest essay, “If I Owned a Gun”, Dubus reflects on the empowerment and shame he felt in keeping a gun, and his decision, ultimately, to give it up. Elsewhere, he writes of a violent youth and of settled domesticity and fatherhood, about the omnipresent expectations and contradictions of masculinity, about the things writers remember and those they forget. Drawing upon kindred literary spirits from Rilke to Rumi to Tim O’Brien, Ghost Dogs renders moments of personal revelation with emotional generosity and stylistic grace, ultimately standing as essential witness and testimony to the art of the essay.

A moving and inspiring anthology of masterful essays on stories that touch the hearts and minds of readers. “A writer,” Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow once said, “is a reader who is moved to emulation.” New York Times bestselling novelist and memoirist Andre Dubus III took that idea and invited acclaimed authors to write about short stories that altered their view of life and their place in it—short stories that, ultimately, made them want to write something substantial themselves. Here is Richard Russo on Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” Joyce Carol Oates on John Updike’s “A&P,” Tobias Wolff on Hawthorne’s “Wakefield,” Michael Cunningham on James Joyce’s “The Dead.” Readers will gain new insight into these masterfully written stories but also on the contributors’ own lives and work.The fifty contributors are T.C. Boyle, Russell Banks, Richard Bausch, Robert Boswell, Charles Baxter, Ann Beattie, Madison Smartt Bell, Ron Carlson, Lan Samantha Chang, Michael Cunningham, Junot Diaz, Anthony Doerr, Emma Donoghue, Stuart Dybek, Dagoberto Gilb, Julia Glass, Mary Gordon, Lauren Groff, Jennifer Haigh, Jane Hamilton, Ron Hansen, Paul Harding, Ann Hood, Pam Houston, Gish Jen, Charles Johnson, Phil Klay, Dennis Lehane, Lois Lowry, Colum McCann, Sue Miller, Rick Moody, Antonya Nelson, Bich Nguyen, Joyce Carol Oates, Stewart O’Nan, Peter Orner, ZZ Packer, Ann Patchett, Edith Pearlman, Jayne Ann Phillips, Kirstin Valdez Quade, Anna Quindlen, Ron Rash, Richard Russo, Dani Shapiro, Mona Simpson, Jess Walter, Tobias Wolff, and Meg Wolitzer.Reaching Inside will remind you why you fell in love with reading.

In these linked novellas in which characters walk out the back door of one story and into the next, love is "dirty"—tangled up with need, power, boredom, ego, fear, and fantasy. On the Massachusetts coast north of Boston, a controlling manager, Mark, discovers his wife's infidelity after twenty-five years of marriage. An overweight young woman, Marla, gains a romantic partner but loses her innocence. A philandering bartender/aspiring poet, Robert, betrays his pregnant wife. And in the stunning title novella, a teenage girl named Devon, fleeing a dirty image of her posted online, seeks respect in the eyes of her widowed great-uncle Francis and of an Iraq vet she’s met surfing the Web.Slivered by happiness and discontent, aging and death, but also persistent hope and forgiveness, these beautifully wrought narratives express extraordinary tenderness toward human beings, our vulnerable hearts and bodies, our fulfilling and unfulfilling lives alone and with others.