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.

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.

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."

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."

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."

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.

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 seven stories collected here–including “Killings,” the basis for Todd Field’s award-winning film In the Bedroom–showcase legendary writer Andre Dubus’s sheer narrative mastery in a book of quietly staggering emotional power.

A father in mourning contemplates the unthinkable as the only way to allay his grief. A boy must learn to care for his younger brother when their mother leaves the family. A young woman who has never lacked lovers despairs of ever finding love itself, and then makes an accidental discovery that brings her real joy. Culled from Dubus’s treasured collections Selected Stories and Dancing After Hours, these beautiful stories of people at pivotal moments in their lives are some of the most bewitching and profound in American fiction.

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.

It is 1967. There's a war going on in Vietnam. In rural Heywood, Massachusetts, white men are playing the blues and eighteen-year-old Leo Suther is writing clumsy love songs to his girlfriend Allie Donovan. Leo has no intention if going off to war. He has big plans for his life with Allie. Though it's summer vacation now, there is no shortage of teachers for Leo. His father warns him that "life can turn on a dime". His jamming partners introduce him to the beauty of the blues harp. Allie's father, the local communist and civil rights organiser, lectures him on politics. And, of course, Allie herself has much to teach him. However, when Leo's life threatens to come unglued, it is his mother's wisdom he turns to. Though she died before Leo was five, her voice lives on in her diaries and poems, testifying to the strength of her love for her husband and son - a love that can still, years later, offer consolation. In Bluesman Andre Dubus III has written a novel of great warmth that evokes a time when America itself was coming of age, a novel that shows the same powerful understanding of humanity and the ways that human beings can misunderstand each other as his extraordinary novel House of Sand and Fog.

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.

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).

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year

From a genuine hero of the American short story comes a luminous collection that reveals the seams of hurt, courage, and tenderness that run through the bedrock of contemporary American life. In these fourteen stories, Dubus depicts ordinary men and women confronting injury and loneliness, the lack of love and the terror of actually having it. Out of his characters' struggles and small failures--and their unexpected moments of redemption--Dubus creates fiction that bears comparison to the short story's greatest creators--Chekhov, Raymond Carver, Flannery O'Connor.



"A master of the short story...It's good to have Andre Dubus back. More than ever, he is an object of hope."--Philadelphia Inquirer


"Dubus's detailed creation of three-dimensional characters is propelled by his ability to turn a quiet but perfect phrase...[This] kind of writing raises gooseflesh of admiration."--San Francisco Chronicle

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