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
2018-05-01
Second of a two-volume collection of short fiction by Dubus (Broken Vessels, 1991, etc.), gathering the previous volumes Finding a Girl in America (1980) and The Times Are Never So Bad (1983).In his lively introduction, Richard Russo posits that Dubus' (1936-1999) often awkward, often confused characters "are too shy or inarticulate or uneducated or lacking in self-awareness to speak for themselves." A fine case in point, as he notes, is Dubus' story "Anna," in which the title character, long envious of the good luck of those who can buy the things she can't afford, spends part of the proceeds of a clumsy robbery on a "round blue Hoover vacuum cleaner" whose cord is longer than her apartment and that, in the end, doesn't do much to elevate her from a humdrum existence of drugs, beer, and laundromats that toss her clothes "like children waving from a ferris wheel." If literature is populated, in the main, by unhappy characters, Dubus' are unhappier than most, caught up in cheerless lives as bank branch managers or dollar-store cashiers; there's a kinship with Raymond Carver in Dubus' attention to working-class people, but he is the greater master of meaningful compression, in which a whole novel is packed into a couple of sentences: "He bled to death, so even then she could have done something. I want to hate her for that. I will, too." Dubus' bleakly proletarian settings, featuring such things as a dumpster "on whose lee side teenagers on summer nights smoked dope and drank beer," are themselves whole universes, as are the military environments in which his stories are sometimes set; all offer a kind of rough humor ("sometimes she disliked him for being alive") in the face of the endless dissatisfactions and disappointments of life.This set, comprising this volume and We Don't Live Here Anymore, will likely do much to revive interest in Dubus' early work.
