Meditations from a Movable Chair: Essays - Hardcover

Dubus, Andre

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 067943108X ISBN 13: 9780679431084

Publisher: Knopf, 1998

Synopsis

For Andre Dubus, "the quotidian and the spiritual don't exist on different planes, but infuse each other. His is an unapologetically sacramental vision of life in which ordinary things participate in the miraculous, the miraculous in ordinary things. He believes in God, and talks to Him, and doesn't mince words. He believes in ghosts . . . He is open to mystery, and of all mysteries the one that interests him most is the human potential for transcendence."

So wrote Tobias Wolff seven years ago, about Andre Dubus's Broken Vessels, and that insight describes perfectly the twenty-five pieces in this powerfully moving new collection, a continuation of Dubus's candid, intensely personal exploration into matters of morality, religion, and creativity. Since that first book of essays, written after the 1986 accident that cost him his leg and, for a time, the ability to write, Mr. Dubus has published Dancing After Hours, a unanimously heralded book of stories "at once harrowing and exhilarating" (Time).
        Here is Dubus on the rape of his beloved sister, his first real job, a gay naval officer, Hemingway,
the blessing of his first marriage, his dear friend Richard Yates, his own crippling, lost autumnal pleasures, having sons and grandsons, his first books, meeting a woman who witnessed his accident, the Catholic church, and, of course, his faith.
        A writer of immense sensitivity, vulnerability, and thoughtfulness--a master at the height of his talent--whose work "is suffused with grace, bathed in a kind of spiritual glow" (New York Times Book Review).

About this title

Review:

In his first book of essays, Broken Vessels, Andre Dubus uses experiences such as baseball games and sheep herding as occasions for insight. His second essay collection, Meditations from a Movable Chair, is about the people who have meant the most to him. The book conjures a cloud of witnesses--Dubus's father, his sister, Norman Mailer, Liv Ullmann, a gay military officer--so vividly that their gifts to Dubus become gifts to the reader, as well. Many of these people helped Dubus understand the holiness, even sacramentality, of everyday life, which he describes in explicitly Catholic terms. Meditations from a Movable Chair is a rare and wonderful thing--a book written out of love, whose richness of heart is expressed by an exacting and challenging mind. --Michael Joseph Gross

From the Back Cover:

"A rich account of the daily torments and triumphs of a human soul . . . [by] one of our most gifted writers." --The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"Sublime . . . . To read these essays is to know what a blessing life can be, and how hard, on legs or on wheels." --St. Petersburg Times

"Dubus's prose is lathed to perfection. . . . [His] essays are every bit as dramatic, captivating, and full of mystery as his fiction." --The Boston Globe

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 067943108X
• ISBN 13: 9780679431084
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 209