During childhood summers in Louisiana, Andre’s grandfather taught him that men’s work is hard. Ever after, 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, Andre worked—at being a better worker and a better human being. In his longest essay, “If I Owned a Gun,” he reflects on the empowerment and shame he felt in keeping a gun, and his decision, ultimately, to give it up. Elsewhere, he writes of 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. In conversation with writers and thinkers 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 nonfiction.

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."

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 neighbors in subsidized 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.

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.

To his friends, to his coworkers, and even to his mistress Moira, Roy Dillon is an honest hardworking salesman. He lives in a cheap hotel just within his pay bracket. He goes to work every day. He has hundreds of friends and associates who could attest to his good character.
Yet, hidden behind three gaudy clown paintings in Roy's pallid hotel room, sits fifty-two thousand dollars--the money Roy makes from his short cons, his "grifting." For years, Roy has effortlessly maintained control over his house-of-cards life--until the simplest con goes wrong, and he finds himself critically injured and at the mercy of the most dangerous woman he ever met: his own mother.
THE GRIFTERS, one of the best novels ever written about the art of the con, is an ingeniously crafted story of deception and betrayal that was the basis for Stephen Frears' and Martin Scorsese's critically-acclaimed film of the same name.

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."

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."

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.

Presents essays by leading short-story writers on their favorite American short stories and why they like them. It will send readers to the library or bookstore to read - or re-read - the stories selected. On the assumption that John Updike was correct when he asserted, in a 1978 letter to Joyce Carol Oates, that "Nobody can read like a writer," Why I Like This Story presents brief essays by forty-eight leading American writers on their favorite American short stories, explaining why they like them. The essays, which are personal, not scholarly, not only tell us much about the story selected, they also tell us a good deal about the author of the essay, about what elements of fiction he or she values. Among the writers whose stories are discussed are such American masters as James, Melville, Hemingway, O'Connor, Fitzgerald, Porter, Carver, Wright, Updike, Bellow, Salinger,Malamud, and Welty; but the book also includes pieces on stories by canonical but lesser-known practitioners such as Andre Dubus, Ellen Glasgow, Kay Boyle, Delmore Schwartz, George Garrett, Elizabeth Tallent, William Goyen, Jerome Weidman, Peter Matthiessen, Grace Paley, William H. Gass, and Jamaica Kincaid, and relative newcomers such as Lorrie Moore, Kirstin Valdez Quade, Phil Klay, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Edward P. Jones. Why I Like This Story will send readers to the library or bookstore to read or re-read the stories selected. Among the contributors to the book are Julia Alvarez, Andrea Barrett, Richard Bausch, Ann Beattie, Andre Dubus, George Garrett, William H. Gass, Julia Glass, Doris Grumbach, Jane Hamilton, Jill McCorkle, Alice McDermott, Clarence Major, Howard Norman, Annie Proulx, Joan Silber, Elizabeth Spencer, and Mako Yoshikawa. Editor Jackson R. Bryer is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Maryland.

With House of Sand and Fog, his National Book Award-nominated novel, Andre Dubus III demonstrated his mastery of the complexities of character and desire. In this earlier novel he captures a roiling time in American history and the coming-of-age of a boy who must decide between desire, ambition, and duty.

In the summer of 1967, Leo Suther has one more year of high school to finish and a lot more to learn. He's in love with the beautiful Allie Donovan who introduces him to her father, Chick — a construction foreman and avowed Communist. Soon Leo finds himself in the midst of a consuming love affair and an intense testing of his political values. Chick's passionate views challenge Leo's perspective on the escalating Vietnam conflict and on just where he stands in relation to the new people in his life. Throughout his — and the nation's — unforgettable "summer of love," Leo is learning the language of the blues, which seem to speak to the mourning he feels for his dead mother, his occasionally distant father, and the youth which is fast giving way to manhood.

Few writers can enter their characters so completely or evoke their lives as viscerally as Andre Dubus III. In this deeply compelling new novel, a father, estranged for the worst of reasons, is driven to seek out the daughter he has not seen in decades. Daniel Ahearn lives a quiet, solitary existence in a seaside New England town. Forty years ago, following a shocking act of impulsive violence on his part, his daughter, Susan, was ripped from his arms by police. Now in her forties, Susan still suffers from the trauma of a night she doesn't remember, as she struggles to feel settled, to love a man and create something that lasts. Lois, her maternal grandmother who raised her, tries to find peace in her antique shop in a quaint Florida town but cannot escape her own anger, bitterness and fear. Cathartic, affirming and steeped in the empathy and precise observations of character for which Dubus is celebrated, Gone So Long explores how the wounds of the past afflict the people we become and probes the limits of recovery and absolution.

The twenty-five luminous and intensely personal essays in this collection are, like Andre Dubus's celebrated short stories, a testament to the author's vulnerability, vision, and indestructible faith. Since losing one leg and the use of the other in a 1986 accident, Dubus has experienced despair, learned acceptance, and, finally, found joy in the sacramental magic of even the most quotidian tasks.
Whether he is writing of the relationship with his father, the rape of his beloved sister, his Catholic faith, the suicide of a gay naval officer, his admiration for fellow writers like Hemingway and Mailer, or the simple act of making sandwiches for his daughters' lunchboxes, Dubus cuts straight to the heart of things. Here we have a master at the height of his powers, an artist whose work "is suffused with grace, bathed in a kind of spiritual glow" (The New York Times Book Review).

After their parents divorced in the 1970s, Andre Dubus III and his three siblings grew up with their exhausted working mother in a depressed Massachusetts mill town saturated with drugs and everyday violence. To protect himself and those he loved, Andre started pumping iron and learned to use his fists so well that he became the kind of man who could send others to the hospital with one punch, and did. Irresistibly drawn to stand up for the underdog, he was on a fast track to getting killed-or killing someone else. Nearby, his father, an eminent author, taught on a college campus and took the kids out on Sundays. The clash of worlds between town and gown, between the hard drinking, drugging, and fighting of "townies" and the ambitions of well-fed students debating books and ideas, couldn't have been more stark or more difficult for a son to communicate to a father. Only by finally putting pen to paper himself did young Andre come into his own, discovering the power of empathy in channeling the stories of others-and ultimately bridging the rift between his father and himself. An unforgettable book, Townie is a riveting and profound meditation on physical violence and the failures and triumphs of love.

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.

Spirituality, sex, violence, guilt, and morality in stories that are filled with a generosity and tenderness that distinguishes the masterful short fiction writer, Andre Dubus. This third volume in the Collected Short Stories and Novellas by Andre Dubus includes the four novellas and two stories collected in The Last Worthless Evening, the novella, Voices from the Moon, plus previously uncollected stories—all with an introduction by Tobias Wolff. “It’s divorce that did it,” his father had said last night. So begins Voices from the Moon, the 126-page novella that takes place over the course of a single day and alternates between the viewpoints of Richie Stowe, a serious twelve-year-old who plans to become a priest, and the five other members of his family. The stories from The Last Worthless Evening range further than in any previous Dubus collection: racial tension in the Navy; a detective story homage; a Hispanic shortstop; the unlikely pairing of an eleven-year-old kid and a dangerous Vietnam vet. Finally, this volume includes previously uncollected stories, including work from the mid-1960s and the late 1990s. The earliest story appearing here is “The Cross Country Runner”—first published in the Midwestern University Quarterly in 1966 when Dubus was 30 years old. The final story—the western-themed “Sisters”—is the last piece of fiction Dubus was working on when he died suddenly in 1999 at the age of 63. Collected Short Stories and Novellas by Andre Dubus includes We Don’t Live Here Anymore, The Winter Father, and The Cross Country Runner. All three contain work by an American master, perfect for anyone who loves stories of the human heart and where it can lead us.

Passion and betrayal, violent desperation, ambivalent love that hinges on hatred, and the quest for acceptance by those who stand on the edge of society-these are the hard-hitting themes of a stunningly crafted first collection of stories by the bestselling author of House of Sand and Fog.

A vigilant young man working in a halfway house finds himself unable to defend against the rage of one of the inmates in the title story. In "White Trees, Hammer Moon," a man soon to leave home for prison finds himself as unprepared for a family camping trip in the mountains of New Hampshire as he has been for most things in his life. And in the award-winning "Forky," an ex-con is haunted by the punishment he receives just as he is being released into the world. With an incisive ability to inhabit the lives of his characters, Dubus travels deep into the heart of the elusive American dream.

In this stunning novel Andre Dubus III set in present-day California a story of human conflict that has the power and resonance of a classical tragedy.Working on a road crew in California, a former colonel in the Shah's Air Force yearns to restore his family's dignity. When an attractive bungalow comes up at a country auction for a fraction of its value, he sees an opportunity to dream his own American Dream, for himself, his wife and children. But for the house's former owner, a recovering alcoholic and addict down on her luck, the loss of her father's house is the latest in a series of insults life has dealt her. When he becomes involved with a married policeman who takes up her cause, the stage is set for a gut-wrenching tragedy, which keeps the reader gripped and moved to the last page.Dubus has an extraordinary ability to get us inside each of his characters, to see the world as it is for each of them. These are ordinary people, people just looking for a small piece of ground to stand on, driven by the same ordinary needs into inevitable conflict - a conflict in which even the reader, rooting for all of them, has no safe haven.Unfolding relentlessly from its opening pages, House of Sand and Fog is a narrative triumph. It turns both the traditional immigrant success story and a modern love story upside down with a heartrending outcome, combining American realism with a Shak

Tender the River captures in verse the history and legacy of the Merrimack River Valley, from the Pennacook, Wamesit, Algonquin, and other indigenous tribes who settled there first, to the European settlers who came with guns and their god to supplant them, to being the birthplace of America's industrial revolution and first labor movements, to becoming a center of continued immigration, of entrenched nativism, and even multicultural celebration. The Merrimack River begins with the confluence of the Pemigewasset and Winnipesaukee rivers spilling from the White Mountains in New Hampshire, then travels down through mill towns like Manchester, Lowell, and Haverhill to finally spit out violently into the Atlantic in the old port (now posh) town of Newburyport. In its journey between those points and as well across the centuries, the Merrimack River Valley has been America in microcosm, many of the nation's democratic successes and demagogic sins being seeded there.

"An illuminating, and at the same time, thoroughly entertaining compilation, Louisiana Stories is enhanced by an introductory essay that is a contribution not only to the literary history of the state but also of the South." Lewis P. Simpson, former professor of English at Louisiana State University and editor of The Southern Review. Southern writers have always excelled in the short story form. Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, and Peter Taylor are the yardsticks by which short story writers are judged not only within the realm of Southern literature but also within that of American literature. By compiling an impressive array of stories by many of the Deep South's finest writers, anthologist Ben Forkner demonstrates how Louisianans in particular have influenced the development of the short story. Forkner writes in his insightful introductory essay: "These same native Louisiana stories manage to announce the central themes of modern Southern fiction more emphatically, and earlier, than the writing of any other single Southern region." Included in this compilation are works by Henry Clay Lewis, George Washington Cable, Lafcadio Hearn, Grace King, Kate Chopin, William Faulkner, Lyle Saxon, Arna Bontemps, Zora Neale Hurston, E.P. O'Donnell, Shirley Ann Grau, Ernest Gaines, Andre Dubus, James Lee Burke, Robb Forman Dew, and John William Corrington. Ben Forkner is the director of the English department at the University of Angers in France where he teaches American and Irish literature. A graduate of Stetson University in Florida, he received his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has co-edited three anthologies of Southern literature, Stories of the Modern South, A Modern Southern Reader, and Stories of the Old South .

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."