The Winter Father

The Collected Short Stories and Novellas of Andre Dubus, Volume 2

By: Andre Dubus

Narrated by: Robert Fass, Joe Barrett, Bronson Pinchot, Cassandra Campbell, Hillary Huber

While the title novella of Dubus' Finding a Girl in America returns to the somewhat off-the-rails literary life of Hank Allison, the collection's opening story strikes a much darker tone: "Killings" - the basis of the Academy Award-nominated film In the Bedroom - is a swift tale of revenge that leaves listeners wondering what they might do in the name of family love.

Dubus' prowess with narrative compression is on full display in the story "Waiting": the hollow ache experienced by a woman widowed by the Korean War took Dubus 14 months to write and was more than 100 pages in early manuscript form but spans a mere seven pages in published form.

Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Joyce Carol Oates called "The Pretty Girl" - the opening novella of The Times Are Never so Bad - "[T]he most compelling and suspenseful work of fiction [Dubus] has written".

Richard Russo's introduction to this volume grapples with his complex feelings on reading Dubus' work over many decades, but when it comes to the much-anthologized masterpiece "A Father's Story", Russo writes: "I won't mince words. It's one of the finest stories ever penned by an American."

©2018 David R Godine (P)2018 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Guide for Finding Individuial Stories on the App

Great stories. As with Volume I in this series (We Don't Live Here Anymore), the way some of the stories are listed in the app makes it hard to jump to that story.

The app index shows the name of most of the stories accurately, but a few are listed inaccurately and some titles listed are not actually individual stories in the book. Below is a guide to sort this out. It's a list of each story that appears in the book, followed by a description of how the story is listed in the app index. The app index separates two of the stories into more than one app index entry, as can be seen below. In cases where the index is accurate, only the title is listed below. Hope this helps!

Introduction: Original Relationships, by Richard Russo
Killings / AUDIBLE: Finding a Girl in America
The Dark Men
His Lover
Townies
The Misogamist
At St. Croix
The Pitcher
Waiting
Delivering
The Winter Father
Finding a Girl in America / AUDIBLE: Finding a Girl in America, Chapter 13
The Pretty Girl / AUDIBLE: The Times Are Never so Bad, Chapter 15,16
Bless Me, Father
Goodbye
Leslie in California
The New Boy
The Captain
Sorrowful Mysteries
Anna
A Father's Story
Editor's Note

Excellent Collection

I love the depth of the storytelling. Andre Debus had a great ear for dialogue and a keen, empathetic eye for character. I will listen to these stories again. He is talented. One of our best.