'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.
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