In this riveting novel of almost unbearable suspense, three fragile yet determined people become dangerously entangled in a relentlessly escalating crisis. Colonel Behrani, once a wealthy man in Iran, is now a struggling immigrant willing to bet everything he has to restore his family’s dignity. Kathy Nicolo is a troubled young woman whose house is all she has left, and who refuses to let her hard-won stability slip away from her. Sheriff Lester Burdon, a married man who finds himself falling in love with Kathy, becomes obsessed with helping her fight for justice.

Drawn by their competing desires to the same small house in the California hills and doomed by their tragic inability to understand one another, the three converge in an explosive collision course. Combining unadorned realism with profound empathy, House of Sand and Fog marks the arrival of a major new voice in American fiction.

Passion and betrayal, violent desperation, ambivalent love that hinges on hatred, and the quest for acceptance by those who stand on the edge of society–these are the hard-hitting themes of a stunningly crafted first collection of stories by the bestselling author of House of Sand and Fog.

In the title story, a vigilant young man working in a halfway house finds himself unable to defend against the rage of one of the inmates. In “White Trees, Hammer Moon,” a man soon to leave home for prison finds himself as unprepared for a family camping trip in the mountains of New Hampshire as he has been for most things in his life. And in “Forky,” an ex-con is haunted by the punishment he receives just as he is being released into the world.

With an incisive ability to inhabit the lives of his characters, Dubus travels deep into the heart of the elusive American dream.

The Cross Country Runner brings together Voices from the Moon, his longest, most masterful novella, and The Last Worthless Evening, Andre Dubus’ fifth collection of short stories and novellas, along with previously uncollected stories and a new introduction by PEN/Faulkner Award-winning author 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 shows Dubus at the height of his empathetic powers. Alternating 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 story takes place over the course of a single day.

The four novellas and two stories of The Last Worthless Evening range further than those of 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.

This third volume in the series also draws together for the first time many of Dubus’ previously uncollected stories, including work from the mid-1960s and the late 1990s. The earliest story appearing here in book form for the first time is “The Cross Country Runner,” which was originally published in the long-defunct Midwestern University Quarterly in 1966 when Dubus was thirty years old and only recently graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The final story–the Western-themed “Sisters”–is the last piece of fiction Dubus was working on when he died suddenly in 1999 at just sixty-three years old.

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 readers 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 fourteen months to write and was more than one hundred 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–“the 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.”

Andre Dubus III, author of the National Book Award–nominated House of Sand and Fog and The Garden of Last Days, reflects on his violent past and a lifestyle that threatened to destroy him—until he was saved by writing.

After their parents divorced in the 1970s, Andre Dubus III and his three siblings grew up with their exhausted working mother in a depressed Massachusetts mill town saturated with drugs and crime. To protect himself and those he loved from street violence, Andre learned to use his fists so well that he was even scared of himself. He was on a fast track to getting killed—or killing someone else—or to beatings-for-pay as a boxer.

Nearby, his father, an eminent author, taught on a college campus and took the kids out on Sundays. The clash of worlds couldn’t have been more stark—or more difficult for a son to communicate to a father. Only by becoming a writer himself could Andre begin to bridge the abyss and save himself. His memoir is a riveting, visceral, profound meditation on physical violence and the failures and triumphs of love.

In the early 1970s, literary journals that contained Andre Dubus’ short stories were passed around among admiring readers. When his debut collection, Separate Flights, arrived in 1975, it was immediately celebrated and won the Boston Globe‘s Laurence L. & Thomas Winship / PEN New England Award.

The collection includes the novella We Don’t Live Here Anymore, which served as the basis for the 2004 film of the same title (nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival); the novella also introduces Dubus’ writer-protagonist Hank Allison, a character who continues to appear throughout his work.

Two years later, the title story of Dubus’ sophomore collection Adultery and Other Choices continued the exploits of Hank Allison. “The title story alone will make it worth your while to go out and get the book,” wrote the New York Times Book Review.

While the collection’s opening stories focus on the fragile nature of youth, later stories shift to darker struggles of adulthood, such as in “Andromache”–Dubus’ first story to appear in the New Yorker (1968)–which traces the aftermath of a tragic death during wartime.