Andre Dubus III
#1 NY Times Bestselling Novelist
Author of House of Sand and Fog
Readings &
Lecture Topics
- Townie: How Writing Saved Me from a Life of Violence
- Writing & Human Creativity
- Social Injustices & Financial Inequality
- The Art of the Memoir
- An Evening with Andre Dubus III
Biography
“Dubus has a keen and generous eye, and the great gift of bestowing dignity on even the most confused of his people.” —Tobias Wolff
“Dubus can home in more quickly and efficiently on a character’s inner life than any writer I’ve encountered in recent memory.” —New York Times Review of Books
“Dubus proves himself both an exquisitely careful craftsman and a painstaking recorder of society.” —Boston Magazine
As eloquent in person as in writing, Andre Dubus III speaks to audiences about the path that led him to become a writer—one that pulled him out of a life of violence and allowed him to find his voice through the arts.
Dubus’ nine books include the New York Times bestsellers House of Sand and Fog, The Garden of Last Days, and his memoir, Townie, a #4 New York Times bestseller and a New York Times “Editors’ Choice.” His novel, House of Sand and Fog, was a finalist for the National Book Award, a #1 New York Times Bestseller, and was made into an Academy Award-nominated film starring Ben Kingsley and Jennifer Connelly. His 2013 novella collection, Dirty Love, was listed as a “Notable Book” by The Washington Post and The New York Times, and was named a New York Times “Editors’ Choice” and a Kirkus “Starred Best Book of 2013.” His 2018 novel, Gone So Long, was named on many “Best Books” lists, including selection for The Boston Globe’s “Twenty Best Books of 2018” and Amazon’s “The Best Books of 2018, Top 100.” His most recent novel, Such Kindness, was one of Amazon’s “The Best Books of 2023, Top 100.” His acclaimed collection of personal essays, Ghost Dog: On Killers and Kin, was published in March 2024. He is also the editor of Reaching Inside: 50 Acclaimed Authors on 100 Unforgettable Short Stories (Godine, 2023). His work has been included in The Best American Essays and The Best Spiritual Writing anthologies.
In his memoir, Dubus traces his upbringing in a depressed Massachusetts mill town where his father worked as a professor. Saturated with drugs and everyday violence, Townie narrates the clash between town and gown, between the hard drinking, drugging, and fighting of “townies” where the ambitions of students debating books and ideas couldn’t have been more stark. 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. Of the work, Richard Russo said: “I’ve never read a better or more serious meditation on violence, its sources, consequences, and, especially, its terrifying pleasures, than Townie. It’s a brutal and, yes, thrilling memoir that sheds real light on the creative process of two of our best writers, Andre Dubus III and his famous, much revered father. You’ll never read the work of either man in quite the same way afterward. You may not view the world in quite the same way either.”
Dubus has been a finalist for the National Book Award, and has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, The National Magazine Award for Fiction, three Pushcart Prizes, and is a recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. His books are published in over twenty-five languages, and he teaches at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.
Short Bio
Andre Dubus III’s nine books include New York Times bestsellers House of Sand and Fog, The Garden of Last Days, and his memoir, Townie, a #4 New York Times bestseller and a New York Times “Editors’ Choice.” His work has been included in The Best American Essays and The Best Spiritual Writing anthologies, and his novel, House of Sand and Fog, was a finalist for the National Book Award, a #1 New York Times Bestseller, and was made into an Academy Award-nominated film starring Ben Kingsley and Jennifer Connelly. His most recent novel, Such Kindness, was one of Amazon’s “The Best Books of 2023, Top 100.” His acclaimed collection of personal essays, Ghost Dog: On Killers and Kin, was published in March 2024. Dubus has been a finalist for the National Book Award, and has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, The National Magazine Award for Fiction, two Pushcart Prizes, and is a recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. His books are published in over twenty-five languages, and he teaches full-time at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.
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Publications
Ghost Dogs
Essay, 2024
Essays from the literary master and bestselling author of Townie on a life of challenges, contradictions, and fulfillments
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.
Such Kindness
Novel, 2023
Tom Lowe’s identity and his pride are invested in the work he does with his back and his hands. He designed and built his family’s dream home, working extra hours to pay off the adjustable rate mortgage he took on the property, convinced he is making every sacrifice for the happiness of his wife and son. Until, in a moment of fatigued inattention, shingling a roof in too-bright sunlight, he falls. In constant pain, addicted to painkillers at the cost of his relationships with his wife and son, Tom slowly comes to realize that he can never work again. If he is not a working man, who is he? He is not, he believes, the kind of person who lives in subsidized housing, though that is where he has ended up. He is not the kind of person who hatches a scheme to commit convenience-check fraud, together with neighbors he considers lowlifes, until he finds himself stealing his banker’s trash. Who is Tom Lowe, and who will he become? Can he find a way to reunite hands and heart, mind and spirit, to be once again a giver and not just a taker, to forge a self-acceptance deeper than pride? Andre Dubus III’s soulful cast includes Trina, the struggling mom next door who sells her own plasma to get by; Dawn, the tough-talking owner of the local hairdressing salon; Jamie, a well-meaning pothead college student ready to stick it to “the man”; and a mix of strangers and neighbors who will never know the role they played in changing a life. To one man’s painful moral journey, Dubus brings compassion with an edge of dark absurdity, forging a novel as absorbing as it is profound.
Reaching Inside: 50 Acclaimed Authors on 100 Unforgettable Short Stories
Anthology, 2023
“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.
Gone So Long
Novel, 2018
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.
Dirty Love
Short Story/Novella, 2013
“In Dirty Love, the new and staggeringly good collection of four not-quite-novella-length stories by Andre Dubus III, we’re presented with characters so disoriented by love they honestly can’t tell whether they’re looking for a way into or a way out of it.” — New York Times
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.
Townie
Memoir, 2011
“In this gritty and gripping memoir, Dubus bares his soul in stunning and page-turning prose.” — Publishers Weekly
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.
The Garden of Last Days
Novel, 2008
“Dubus’ hyperdetailed, visceral, and prurient yet undeniably compassionate thriller boldly explores the bewildering complexities of sexuality, and the dire repercussions of isolation and desperation.” —Donna Seaman
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.
House of Sand and Fog
Novel, 1999
“House of Sand and Fog is one of the best American novels I’ve ever read. It’s a stunning book.” —James Lee Burke
In this page-turning, breathtaking novel, the characters will walk off the page and into your life. And a small house will seem like the most important piece of territory in the world. On a road crew in California, a former colonel in the Iranian Air Force under the Shah yearns to restore his family’s dignity. When an attractive bungalow comes available on county auction for a fraction of its value, he sees a great opportunity for himself, his wife, and his children. But the house’s former owner, a recovering alcoholic and addict down on her luck, doesn’t see it that way, nor does her lover, a married cop driven to extremes to win her love and get her house back. 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 people with ordinary flaws, people just looking for a small piece of ground to stand on, driven by the same needs into inevitable conflict—a conflict in which even the reader, rooting for all of them, has no safe haven. Unfolding relentlessly from its tense and colorful first lines, 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, in a masterstroke of American realism and Shakespearean consequence. It is an American tragedy, and a shockingly true picture of the country we live in today.
Articles & Audio
Read What’s In Print
• He Killed Her Mother. Now He Wants to Make Amends — The New York Times
• Andre Dubus III weaves hints of his past onto the pages of new read – Eagle-Tribune
• Andre Dubus III on What It’s Like to Write a Novel – Literary Hub
• Review: Gone So Long by Andre Dubus III – Washington Post
• Andre Dubus III: By the Book – New York Times
• Review: Gone So Long by Andre Dubus III – Minneapolis Star Tribune
• The Case for Writing a Story Before Knowing How It Ends — The Atlantic
• Compulsive Behavior: Dirty Love — The New York Times
• Review of Dirty Love — Kirkus
Listen to Audio
• The Truth of Fiction – Andre Dubus III – NEPR
• Dubus Reads from The Garden of Last Days – NPR
• A Family Struggles With Forgiveness 40 Years After Mother’s Murder – WBUR
Selected Writings
• Read an excerpt from Townie – BookBrowse
TOWNIE (excerpt)
Visits with Pop
On the other side of the river was Bradford. It’s where a lot of Jocks at the high school lived, the kids who wore corduroys and sweaters and looked clean. It’s where houses had big green lawns. It’s where the college was where pop taught. It’s where he lived in an apartment building with Theo Metrakos and his friend Dave Supple, a writer too.
Since leaving our mother, Pop had lived in a few places, but we rarely saw them and never slept there. Years later I would hear my father say the divorce had left him dating his children. That still meant picking us up every Sunday for a matinee and, if he had the money, an early dinner somewhere. For a few years now he was taking us to church too. He’d pull up in his rusted-out Lancer and drive us to Mass at Sacred Hearts in Bradford Square. The five of us would walk down the aisle between the crowded pews, Jeb and I with our long hair, Suzanne in her tight hip- huggers, Nicole in her brace she now wore for scoliosis, Pop one of the only men in church not wearing a jacket or tie. He refused to put money in the collection basket, too. Many times I’d hear him say, “You think Jesus ever wore a [expletive] tie? Did Jesus spend money on buildings?”
One night, when we were still living at the doctor’s house, I heard Mom on the phone trying to convince Pop that he should start taking out each of us one at a time, that he was never going to know us as individual people if he didn’t.
I don’t know if I cared then about that or not, but a cool sweat broke out on my forehead just thinking about being alone with Pop. I’d never been alone with him. What would I say? What would we talk about? What would we do?
When Mom got off the phone, she said, “I can’t believe it. Your father says he’ll be too shy with each of you. He’s scared of his own kids!”
This made me feel better and worse, but every Wednesday night he’d drive up to the house and take one of us back to his apartment across the river. It was on the third floor of an old brick building covered with ivy. Across the street was the Bradford Green, a lawn and trees and a gazebo, and you could see it from his bedroom where his bed was always made and there were shelves of books and his black wooden desk I remembered from when he used to live with us, its surface clean and organized, notebooks stacked neatly beside his typewriter beside his humidor and pipe stand, six or eight of them each with a white pipe cleaner sticking out of the mouthpiece.
HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG (excerpt)
The fat one, the radish Torez, he calls me camel because I am Persian and because I can bear this August sun longer than the Chinese and the Panamanians and even the little Vietnamese Tran. He works very quickly without rest, but when Torez stops the orange highway truck in front of the crew, Tran hurries for his paper cup of water with the rest of them. This heat is no good for work. All morning we have walked this highway between Sausalito and the Golden Gate Park. We carry our small trash harpoons and we drag our burlap bags and we are dressed in vests the same color as the highway truck. Some of the Panamanians remove their shirts and leave them hanging from their back pockets like oil rags, but Torez says something to them in their mother language and he makes them wear the vests over their bare backs. We are upon a small hill. Between the trees I can see out over Sausalito to the bay where there are clouds so thick I cannot see the other side where I live with my family in Berkeley, my wife and son. But here there is no fog, only sun on your head and back, and the smell of everything under the nose: the dry grass and dirt; the cigarette smoke of the Chinese; the hot metal and exhaust of the passing automobiles. I am sweating under my shirt and vest. I have fifty-six years and no hair. I must buy a hat.
Read full excerpt here
