From Booklist
*Starred Review* Award–winning novelist Dubus (The Garden of Last Days, 2008) debuted as a short story writer nearly 25 years ago. He now reclaims the form in an incisive collection of subtly linked tales set in a changing New Hampshire coastal town. With fresh energy and conviction, Dubus explores the demands and disappointments of desire and marriage, generating a critical mass of sensory detail and refined suspense. A desperately orderly man hires a detective to follow his longtime, suddenly unfaithful wife. Two overweight loners attempt to find the intimacy other couples seem to take for granted. A bartender posing as a poet and living on charm and evasiveness suddenly faces the realities of fatherhood. In the unforgettable novella “Dirty Love,” Devon is hounded out of high school when a dirty cell-phone video, recorded without her permission, is posted online. She seeks sanctuary with her great-uncle Francis, a retired teacher haunted by his experiences in the Korean War. Dubus’ emotional discernment, sexual candor, penetrating evocation of place, sensitivity to family conflicts, and keen attunement to the perils of our embrace of “iEverything”—from online sexual roulette to cyberbullying and violent video games—are electrifying, compassionate, and profound. These are masterful and ravishing tales of loneliness, confusion, betrayal, the hunger for oblivion, and the quest for forgiveness. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: A seven-city author tour and major national media coverage will support the latest provocative book by best-selling Dubus. --Donna Seaman
Review
“Reading these stories is like visiting a classic steakhouse where the coolly professional waiters don't hold your cultivated taste for high-concept haute cuisine against you, but rather decide to remind you what you've been missing by giving you one of the best dining experiences you've ever had.” (Jeff Turrentine - New York Times Book Review)
“First rate fiction by a dazzling talent. (starred review)” (Kirkus Reviews)
“Highly recommended…. Filled with heartbreak, slices of happiness, and unrelenting hope.” (Lisa Block - Library Journal)
“It’s that just-out-of-reach desire that creates such poignancy in each of these stories, including one about a philandering bartender named Robert, who likes to pretend he’s a poet. He’s not, but Dubus is. He’s got a transparent, easy style that’s never self-consciously lyrical but constantly delivers phrases of insight and gentle wit that lay open these characters without scalding them with irony, as we’ve come to expect from so many clever novelists.” (Ron Charles - Washington Post)
“I can think of no novelist who renders the gritty, down-and-out corners of New England better than Dubus, and those beautifully specific, contained slices of American life open into whole universes of love, violence, guilt, and betrayal.” (The New Republic)
“Powerful… lush.” (Anthony Doerr - Boston Globe)
“Fabulous…[Dubus’s] writing is as gorgeous as ever.” (Kim Curtis - Associated Press)
“[Dubus] writ[es] with…winning candor and intelligence.” (Mark Athitakis - Star Tribune)
“Staggeringly good… . Dubus can home in more quickly and efficiently on a character’s inner life than any writer I’ve encountered in recent memory.” (Jeff Turrentine - New York Times Book Review)
“Intimate short stories and novellas about the difficulty of sharing lives, about betrayal and fidelity and the emotional violence we inflict on the people we love.” (Nina MacLaughlin - Boston Magazine)
“Dubus delivers strong insights into bad behavior.” (Mary Pols - San Francisco Chronicle)
“Gorgeous.” (Chloe Schama - The New Republic)
“[N]obody does quiet desperation better than Dubus.” (The New Yorker)
See all Editorial Reviews