W.W. Norton
October 2013
On Sale: September 30, 2013
300 pages ISBN: 0393064654 EAN: 9780393064650 Kindle: B00CEIH2Z2 Hardcover / e-Book Add to Wish List
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.