The Cross Country Runner - (Collected Short Stories and Novellas) by Andre Dubus (Paperback)

About the Book

The third volume in Godines 2018 re-issue of the short stories and novellas of Andre Dubus, The Cross Country Runner brings together his 1986 collection Last Worthless Evening and Voices from the Moonhis longest, most masterful novellawith previously uncollected stories, and a new introduction by PEN Faulkner Award-winning author Tobias Wolff.

Book Synopsis

Spirituality, sex, violence, guilt, and morality in stories that are filled with a generosity and tenderness that distinguishes the masterful short fiction writer, Andre Dubus.

This third volume in the Collected Short Stories and Novellas by Andre Dubus includes the four novellas and two stories collected in The Last Worthless Evening, the novella, Voices from the Moon, plus previously uncollected stories--all with an introduction by 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 takes place over the course of a single day and alternates 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 stories from The Last Worthless Evening range further than in 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.

Finally, this volume includes previously uncollected stories, including work from the mid-1960s and the late 1990s. The earliest story appearing here is "The Cross Country Runner"--first published in the Midwestern University Quarterly in 1966 when Dubus was 30 years old. The final story--the western-themed "Sisters"--is the last piece of fiction Dubus was working on when he died suddenly in 1999 at the age of 63.

Collected Short Stories and Novellas by Andre Dubus includes We Don't Live Here Anymore, The Winter Father, and The Cross Country Runner. All three contain work by an American master, perfect for anyone who loves stories of the human heart and where it can lead us.

Review Quotes

Praise for Andre Dubus and the three-volume, Collected Short Stories & Novellas

"The three volumes reaffirm Dubus's status as a master, as an unparalleled excavator of the heart and its pains, its longings, its errors, its thumping against the constant threat of grief, despair, and loneliness."--Nina MacLaughlin, The Paris Review

"Dubus has been compared to Chekhov, and there is much that is apt in that. His collection restores faith in the survival of the short story."--The Los Angeles Times

"All his work is informed by a quality rare in fiction: compassion."--Philadelphia Inquirer

"Mr. Dubus is a shrewd student of people who come to accept pain as a fair price for pleasure, and to view right and wrong as a matter of degree; without moralizing, he suggests that their self-inflicted punishments are often worse that what a just court, or a just God, would decree."--John Updike, The New Yorker

"Dubus is a patient, resourceful and profound writer who never gives in to convention--although his situations are our situations, and imminently recognizable. The great, addictive pleasure of reading him arises from our anticipation that he is always going to say something interesting."-- Richard Ford

"Andre Dubus's brilliant stories are so full of compassion and humor, heartache and desire, violence and tenderness, that, reading them, it's impossible not to see the most secret and shameful parts of our own lives reflected back at us. I can think of few writers whose stories are so profoundly moving that I find myself responding to them both viscerally and intellectually--sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, page by page. These beautiful new editions triumphantly showcase stories by one of the greatest writers America has ever produced."-- Molly Antopol, National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" Award winner

"...the language of [Dubus's] stories is at the service of something outside itself ... often we forget we are reading sentences but are put rather into more direct connection with the character's thoughts and feelings."--William Pritchard, The Boston Globe

"To enter the work of Dubus is to be hurtled inside a world so deeply that one knows these people immediately. He always delivers; bam! Story after story will blow you away; his honesty is terrifying and liberating. There is no one like him; he is inimitable."-- Elizabeth Strout

"That Andre Dubus is up there with the short story immortals now--Welty, Hemingway, Gallant--is indisputable. But read a Dubus story and you don't think much about the brilliance of the craft because you're too busy becoming immersed in the lives of his characters and you come to know them as you might your sister or your brother, your son or your daughter. He goes that deep into the souls of his people, and just when you think he can't go deeper, a sentence will leave you shattered. Love was his great subject and to my mind few have explored love's mysteries with as much generosity. Can one writer's words make us more human? The words of Andre Dubus can--and do."-- Peter Orner, National Book Critics Circle Awards finalist

"He is the greater master of meaningful compression, in which a whole novel is packed into a couple of sentences..."--Kirkus Reviews

"For the lyricism and directness of his language, the richness and precision of his observation, he is among the best short-story writers in America."--Judith Levine, The Village Voice

"In each surprising tale, Dubus, equally empathic in portraying women and men, tackles with supreme candor precision, artistry, and valor the full emotional and moral weight of love, marriage adultery, friendship, parenthood, ambition, selfishness, and loneliness, subtly critiquing the social mores versus questions of self and faith."--Booklist, starred review

"Dubus is interested in essential things--in the shadowy powers that circle our lives and the slender resources of faith and love with which we try to keep them at bay."--Tobias Wolff

"Dubus is good -- so good in fact that if [this is] your introduction to his work, you're apt to wonder where he's been hiding."--Washington Post

"...the appearance of these stories in book form is an event . . . you will certainly want to keep it and read it again."--Chicago Tribune