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About The Cross Country Runner: Collected Short Stories and Novellas, Volume 3 (The Collected Short Stories and Novellas of Andre Dubus)

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.