Townie

Dubus, Andre, III

ISBN 10: 1441781579 ISBN 13: 9781441781574

Publisher: Blackstone Pub, 2011

Synopsis

The author of House of Sand and Fog describes his childhood in a depressed Massachusetts mill town saturated with drugs and crime and his weekly visits with his father, an eminent author who taught on a college campus. Simultaneous. Book available.

About this title

Review:

Amazon.com Best Books of the Month, February 2011: Rarely has the process of becoming a writer seemed as organic and--dare I say it--moral as it does in Andre Dubus III's clear-eyed and compassionate memoir, Townie. You might think that following his father's trade would have been natural and even obvious for the son and namesake of Andre Dubus, one of the most admired short story writers of his time, but it was anything but. His father left when he was 10, and as his mother worked long hours to keep them fed, her four children mostly raised themselves, stumbling through house parties and street fights in their Massachusetts mill town, so cut off from the larger world that when someone mentioned "Manhattan" when Andre was in college he didn't know what they were talking about. What he did know, and what he recalls with detailed intensity, were the battles in bars and front yards, brutal to men and women alike, that first gave him discipline, as he built himself from a fearful kid into a first-punch, hair-trigger bruiser, and then empathy, as, miraculously, he pulled himself back from the violence that threatened to define him. And it was out of that empathy that, wanting to understand the stories of the victims of brutality as well as those whose pain drove them to dish it out, he began to write, reconciling with his father and eventually giving us novels like House of Sand and Fog and now this powerful and big-hearted memoir. --Tom Nissley, Amazon.com

[ ... ] Townie is a mesmerising work, one of the best accounts I've encountered of violence and its causes. It is worth reading just for Dubus's lengthy descriptions of fighting passages that exhilarate even as they sicken. --William Skidelsky, Observer

Townie is riveting and poignant. The writing is crisp and lively Dubus seems fixated with the smell of the air --Ángel Gurría-Quintana, FT

About the Author:

National Book Award finalist Andre Dubus III is the author of The Garden of Last Days and House of Sand and Fog.

About this edition

• Publisher: Blackstone Pub
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1441781579
• ISBN 13: 9781441781574
• Binding: Audio CD