Collected Short Stories and Novellas of Andre Dubus

In the early 1970s, literary journals that contained Andre Dubus' short stories were passed around among admiring readers. When his debut collection, Separate Flights, arrived in 1975, it was immediately celebrated and won the Boston Globe's Laurence L. & Thomas Winship / PEN New England Award. The collection includes the novella We Don't Live Here Anymore, which served as the basis for the 2004 film of the same title (nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival); the novella also introduces Dubus' writer-protagonist Hank Allison, a character who continues to appear throughout his work. Two years later, the title story of Dubus' sophomore collection Adultery and Other Choices continued the exploits of Hank Allison. While the collection's opening stories focus on the fragile nature of youth, later stories shift to darker struggles of adulthood, such as in "Andromache" - Dubus's first story to appear in The New Yorker (1968)-which traces the aftermath of a tragic death during wartime.

While the title novella of Dubus' Finding a Girl in America returns to the somewhat off-the-rails literary life of Hank Allison, the collection's opening story strikes a much darker tone: "Killings"-the basis of the Academy Award-nominated film In the Bedroom-is a swift tale of revenge that leaves readers wondering what they might do in the name of family love. Dubus' prowess with narrative compression is on full display in the story "Waiting": the hollow ache experienced by a woman widowed by the Korean War took Dubus fourteen months to write and was more than one hundred pages in early manuscript form but spans a mere seven pages in published form.

The Cross Country Runner brings together Voices from the Moon, his longest, most masterful novella, and The Last Worthless Evening, Andre Dubus' fifth collection of short stories and novellas, along with previously uncollected stories and a new introduction by PEN/Faulkner Award-winning author 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 shows Dubus at the height of his empathetic powers. Alternating 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 story takes place over the course of a single day. The four novellas and two stories of The Last Worthless Evening range further than those of 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. This third volume in the series also draws together for the first time many of Dubus' previously uncollected stories, including work from the mid-1960s and the late 1990s. The earliest story appearing here in book form for the first time is "The Cross Country Runner," which was originally published in the long-defunct Midwestern University Quarterly in 1966 when Dubus was thirty years old and only recently graduated from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. The final story-the Western-themed "Sisters"-is the last piece of fiction Dubus was working on when he died suddenly in 1999 at just sixty-three years old.