Dirty Love

25 July 2014

Description

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.

Reviews

"The loosely linked stories vividly paint the intensity of despair, uncertainty, loneliness and affection, and the many demons that torment the soul. Dubus’s offerings feel intimate and are powerfully executed." — April L. Judge, Library Journal

Also By: Andre Dubus III

Such Kindness: A Novel
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Ghost Dogs: On Killers and Kin
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Essays from the literary master and best-selling author of Townie on a life of challenges, contradictions and fulfillments
Such Kindness: A Novel
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A full-hearted parable of aspiration, loss and redemption from a literary master of working-class New England.
Gone So Long: A Novel
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Andre Dubus III probes the limits of recovery and absolution in this masterpiece of empathy.
Gone So Long: A Novel
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Andre Dubus III’s first novel in a decade is a masterpiece of thrilling tension and heartrending empathy.