In this heartbreakingly beautiful book of disillusioned intimacy and persistent yearning, beloved and celebrated author Andre Dubus III explores the bottomless needs and stubborn weaknesses of people seeking gratification in food and sex, work and love. 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.

Product Description: [* Read by the author - Andre Dubus III] The stunningly crafted first collection of seven stories by the bestselling author of Townie and House of Sand and Fog. 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...read more

Andre Dubus III, author of the National Book Award-nominated House of Sand and Fog and The Garden of Last Days, reflects on his violent past and a lifestyle that threatened to destroy him -- until he was saved by writing. 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 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, an eminent author, taught on a college campus and took the kids out on Sundays. The clash of worlds couldn't have been more stark -- or more difficult for a son to communicate to a father. Only by becoming a writer himself could Andre begin to bridge the abyss and save himself. His memoir is a riveting, visceral, profound meditation on physical violence and the failures and triumphs of love.

This collection of stories portrays characters on the edge--from a prison guard kidnapped by a convict he considered a friend, to a waitress who betrays her lover, to a young girl who seeks solace from an abusive father with two abusive boys. Reprint. 25,000 first printing. (view table of contents)

In 1967, Leo Suther, a white eighteen-year-old boy interested in blues music, finds himself caught up in the Vietnam War, in a coming-of-age novel about a young man struggling with personal conflict, ambition, desire, and duty. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.

A multi-award-winning writer presents a collection of twenty-five thoughtful, morally sensitive essays on such subjects as his first summer job, the rape of his sister, Ernest Hemingway, his crippling accident, and the Catholic Church. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.

A collection of fourteen short stories explores the unseen mysteries of everyday life as people caught in a wide variety of circumstances contend with the perversities of love, faith, luck, and fate. Reprint. 30,000 first printing. NYT.

Stories describe the ways love can become twisted, guiltridden, or painful and family relationships strained (view table of contents)

Twenty-three stories representing fifteen years of the author's career explore the polarities of violence and tenderness, destruction and salvation, and hedonism and asceticism

These autobiographical essays tell of the authors Catholic boyhood in a Cajun-Creole community in Louisianna, his wives and children, the business of making a living as a writer, and the 1986 car accident which cost him the use of his legs

Product Description: Incloudes bibliography and index.