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
This audiobook is a remarkable combination of extraordinary writing and superb narrating. Dubus is a master storyteller, and the narrators who perform this collection of short stories are some of the best in the business. The result is an amazing listening experience. Each narrator is up to the task of taking on Dubus’s stories, which cover love and loss, friendships and jealousy, tragedy and other moments in life large and small. All the narrators bring depth and understanding to their performances. This collection reveals both the extraordinary talents of the writer and narrators, and will leave listeners eager for the next two volumes of Dubus’s work. J.P.S. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine
2018-05-01
First of a two-volume collection of short fiction by Dubus (Dancing After Hours, 1996, etc.), a Chekhov-ian laureate of silences and secrets.As Ann Beattie notes in her introduction to this volume, which gathers the collections Separate Flights (1975) and Adultery & Other Choices (1977), Dubus (1936-1999), a Catholic Louisianan so long resident in the Northeast that he is often thought of as a New England writer, was unusually capable of populating his work with believable women, "and it may be more unusual than I realize that he so consistently created and stayed so close to his female characters." That much emerges from the short stories and novellas gathered here, though in the end the men in them often behave badly. In the title story, a writer on a leafy campus stuns his much-suffering wife with "sordid, drunken adultery"; she remains with him, her suffering continuing, while he continues his miscreant ways, and life goes on, awaiting further betrayals and disappointments. Many of the stories have a military setting, befitting Dubus' service in the Marine Corps; in one, "Corporal of Artillery," the title character re-enlists for reasons he himself doesn't quite understand, then returns to a wife whom he barely seems to know, a woman who behaves "as though she were playing grown-up when here she was with three kids and not even old enough to vote yet." When Dubus' characters speak to each other, it is more often to speak past each other. For all that, Dubus finds an elegant sort of theology even in mutual incomprehension and bad behavior; in the meaningfully titled story "Adultery," a former priest finds profound meaning in lovemaking: "Our bodies aren't just meat then; they become statement too; they become spirit." In such moments, Dubus reveals a kinship not with Raymond Carver, with whom he is often paired, but instead with Flannery O'Connor.A welcome gathering of work by a writer always worth reading.
