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Sign up todayThe Cross Country Runner
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Learn moreThe 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.
Andre Dubus (1936–1999) is considered among the most talented American short-story writers of his generation. Born and raised in Louisiana, he spent his adult life living and teaching in blue-collar mill towns in northern New England.
Dubus’ short stories and essays appeared in distinguished literary journals and magazines across the country, and were selected for numerous editions of the Best American Short Stories series, as well as the O. Henry Award and Pushcart Prize anthologies. Dubus’ work earned him MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, the Rea Award for the Short Story, the Jean Stein Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and nominations for a National Book Critics Circle Award and Pulitzer Prize.
In addition to seven collections of stories and novellas, Dubus published one novel and two collections of essays. The award-winning films In the Bedroom and We Don’t Live Here Anymore were adapted from his stories.
Dubus is buried in Haverhill, Massachusetts.
Bronson Pinchot is an Earphones and Audie Award–winning narrator and Audible’s Narrator of the Year for 2010.
Robert Fass is a veteran actor and twice winner of the prestigious Audie Award for best narration. He has earned mulltiple Earphones Awards, including one for his narration of Francisco Goldman’s Say Her Name, which was named one of AudioFile magazine’s Best Audiobooks of 2011. He has given voice to modern and classic fiction writers alike, including Ray Bradbury, Joyce Carol Oates, Isaac Asimov, Jeffrey Deaver, and John Steinbeck, as well as to nonfiction works in history, memoir, health, journalism, and business.
Joe Barrett began his acting career at the age of five in the basement of his family's home in upstate New York. He has gone on to play many stage roles, both on and off-Broadway, and in regional theaters from Los Angeles, Houston, and St. Louis to Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and Portland, Maine. He has appeared in films and television, both prime time and late night, and in hundreds of television and radio commercials. Joe has narrated over two hundred audiobooks. He has been an Audie Award finalist eight times, and his narration of Gun Church by Reed Farrel Coleman won the 2013 Audie Award for Original Work. AudioFile magazine has granted Joe fourteen Earphones Awards, including for James Salter's All That Is and Donald Katz's Home Fires. Regarding Joe's narration of John Irving's A Prayer For Owen Meany, AudioFile said, "This moving book comes across like a concerto . . . with a soloist-Owen's voice-rising from the background of an orchestral narration." Joe is married to actor Andrea Wright, and together they have four very grown children.
Cassandra Campbell has won multiple Audie Awards, Earphones Awards, and the prestigious Odyssey Award for narration. She was been named a “Best Voice” by AudioFile magazine and in 2018 was inducted in Audible’s inaugural Narrator Hall of Fame.
Hillary Huber, a Los Angeles–based voice talent with hundreds of commercials and promos under her belt, was bitten by the audiobook bug in 2005. She now records books on a regular basis and has been nominated for several Audie Awards and won numerous Earphones Awards.
Reviews
“The three volumes reaffirm Dubus’s status as a master, as an unparalleled excavator of the heart and its pains, its longings, its errors, its thumping against the constant threat of grief, despair, and loneliness.”
“Potent, searching stories…Dubus’ frank and inquisitive stories of conscience are incisively of their time and of ours.”
“The volumes that underlie this collection represent Dubus at perhaps the apex of his career. The stories and novellas gathered here are often topical and even everyday; many of them speak to Dubus’ preoccupations, including racism and the military life…All of Dubus’ characters are searchers—and some find what it is they’re looking for, which isn’t necessarily a good thing. “A welcome gathering in a worthy project to bring Dubus’ work to a new generation of readers.”
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