Synopses & Reviews
With “an eye for searing detail that is unequaled so far this century” (
Dallas Morning News) celebrated author Andre Dubus III explores the bottomless needs and stubborn weaknesses of people seeking gratification in food and sex, work and love.
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, shadowed by aging and death but also by 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.
Review
"Highly recommended....Filled with heartbreak, slices of happiness, and unrelenting hope." Lisa Block, Library Journal
Review
"It's that just-out-of-reach desire that creates such poignancy in each of these stories, including one about a philandering bartender named Robert, who likes to pretend he's a poet. He's not, but Dubus is. He's got a transparent, easy style that's never self-consciously lyrical but constantly delivers phrases of insight and gentle wit that lay open these characters without scalding them with irony, as we've come to expect from so many clever novelists." Ron Charles, Washington Post
Review
"I can think of no novelist who renders the gritty, down-and-out corners of New England better than Dubus, and those beautifully specific, contained slices of American life open into whole universes of love, violence, guilt, and betrayal." The New Republic
Review
"Powerful...lush." Anthony Doerr, Boston Globe
Review
"Fabulous...[Dubus's] writing is as gorgeous as ever." Kim Curtis, Associated Press
Review
"[Dubus] writ[es] with...winning candor and intelligence." Mark Athitakis, Star Tribune
Synopsis
From the award-winning author of the #1 bestseller House of Sand and Fog, a heartbreakingly beautiful book of disillusioned intimacy and persistent yearning.
Synopsis
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.
"
About the Author
Andre Dubus III grew up in Haverhill, Massachusetts, and is the author of Townie (winner of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award), The Garden of Last Days, House of Sand and Fog (a National Book Award finalist and Oprah pick), Bluesman, and The Cage Keeper & Other Stories. He lives with his family north of Boston.