Synopses & Reviews
Review:
"What John Cheever did for upper-middle-class suburbs the equally talented Dubus does for the blue-collar manufacturing towns of Massachusetts. The most compelling of these finely crafted stories depicts the inhabitants of fading communities struggling to maintain stability as factories close and customary ways disappear....Often graphic, never unbelievable, the tales are dense with the dark side of the American dream. Recommended." Library Journal
Review:
"Dubus is the sort of writer who instructs the heart." Atlantic Monthly
Review:
"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
Review:
"His power is ominous and genuine." Vanity Fair
Review:
"With unflinching candor Dubus explores the uneasy accommodations of marriage and adultery, the self-deceptions of middle age and the terrors of childhood." Publishers Weekly
Review:
"There isn't a better short story writer in America." Minneapolis Tribune
Review:
"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 than what a just court, or a just God, would decree." The New Yorker
Synopsis:
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
About the Author
The author of nine works of fiction, Andre Dubus received the PEN/Malamud Award, the Rea Award for excellence in short fiction, the Jean Stein Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Boston Globe?s first annual Lawrence L. Winship Award, and fellowships from both the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations. Until his death in 1999, he lived in Haverhill, Massachusetts.
Table of Contents
I
Miranda Over the Valley 1
The Winter Father 20
Waiting 41
Killings 47
II
The Pretty Girl 65
III
Graduation 121
The Pitcher 131
After the Game 147
Cadence 154
If They Knew Yvonne 174
IV
Rose 198
V
The Fat Girl 233
The Captain 248
Anna 262
They Now Live in Texas 283
VI
Voices From the Moon 288
VII
Townies 359
Leslie in California 371
The Curse 376
Sorrowful Mysteries 383
Delivering 397
VIII
Adultery 406
A Father's Story 455
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