Andre Dubus

Twenty-three unforgettable short stories from one of America’s most celebrated literary masters.
John Updike once said of his friend and fellow writer Andre Dubus: “[He] 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.” Dubus’s characters are depicted in all their imperfection, but with the author’s requisite tenderness...

After their parents divorce in the 1970's, Andre Dubus III and his three siblings grew up with their exhausted working mother in a depressed Massachusetts mill town saturated with drugs and crime. To protect himself and those he loved from street violence, Andre learned to use his fists so well that he was even scared of himself. He was on a fast track to getting killed, or killing someone else, or to beatings-for-pay as a boxer. Nearby, his father,...

Opportunity knocks for an Iranian immigrant in California when the county offers for sale a seized house at a bargain price. It will serve as a launching pad for his real-estate business. When the county discovers it made an error, the drug-addicted woman who owned the house demands its return, but the Iranian refuses. Unfortunately for him, the woman's lover is a policeman who takes the law into his hands.

A collection of short stories examining the lives of suburbanites seeking solace and gratification in food, sex, work, and love.

Kathy gets evicted from her home for failing to pay a tax she never should have been charged to pay in the first place. The house is swiftly put up for auction and bought by a former military officer from Iran named Behrani. When legal efforts fail her, Kathy turns to a sympathetic cop who wants out of a loveless marriage and who is willing to step over legal boundaries if it might give him the fresh start he is so badly craving.