About this item
Highlights
- "Renders with grace and tenderness the often unconscious need and yearning a young person has for an authentic teacher... a beautiful and deeply moving memoir.
- Author(s): Joseph Hurka
- 274 Pages
- Biography + Autobiography, Personal Memoirs
Description
About the Book
A story of mentorship, friendship, and resilience, On the Invisible Palm of God chronicles Joseph Hurka's transformative relationship with the legendary short story writer Andre Dubus.
Book Synopsis
"Renders with grace and tenderness the often unconscious need and yearning a young person has for an authentic teacher... a beautiful and deeply moving memoir." Andre Dubus III
In his undergraduate years, Joseph Hurka's mentor was the writer Andre Dubus, a great, large spirit of a man, today considered a twentieth-century master of the short story. Dubus opened new artistic doors for the young Hurka; he sent his student on to the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, where Hurka started his career in earnest as a writer and teacher himself.
In 1986 Dubus, trying to help stranded motorists on a highway outside Boston, survived a traumatic highway accident that left him with thirty-four broken bones and an amputated leg. Hurka did his best, for the remaining twelve years of Dubus' life, to help as his mentor and friend went through a courageous fight to regain physical strength and to write again.
ON THE INVISIBLE PALM OF GOD is about an enduring friendship, and the hidden resilience of the human spirit that resides within all of us.
Review Quotes
"With lyrical and evocative prose, Joseph Hurka not only captures here his mentor, my late father, the short story master Andre Dubus, he also renders with grace and tenderness the often unconscious need and yearning a young person has for an authentic teacher... a beautiful and deeply moving memoir." Andre Dubus III
"This is a book that honors the memory of one of America's greatest storytellers while reminding us that writers are characters themselves, unlikely heroes, flawed companions, both born of and broken by the world." Jennifer Militello, Poet Laureate of New Hampshire
"Tobias Wolff has described the work of the late writer Andre Dubus as "an unapologetically sacramental vision of life in which ordinary things participate in the miraculous, the miraculous in ordinary things." The gift of this vision returns to us in On the Invisible Palm of God, a remarkably wise, intimate, and luminous memoir by Joseph Hurka, Dubus's one-time student and longtime friend." Susan Dodd, author of MAMAW
"This eloquent memoir of apprenticeship, friendship, and tribute to fiction writer Andre Dubus (pere) reminds me of Gorki's classic account of Tolstoy or more recently Tom Grimes's of Frank Conroy. Torches of craft and spirit are shared, and then passed on." DeWitt Henry, author of Do I Dream or Wake?
