Product Description

The twenty-five luminous and intensely personal essays in this collection are, like Andre Dubus's celebrated short stories, a testament to the author's vulnerability, vision, and indestructible faith. Since losing one leg and the use of the other in a 1986 accident, Dubus has experienced despair, learned acceptance, and, finally, found joy in the sacramental magic of even the most quotidian tasks.
Whether he is writing of the relationship with his father, the rape of his beloved sister, his Catholic faith, the suicide of a gay naval officer, his admiration for fellow writers like Hemingway and Mailer, or the simple act of making sandwiches for his daughters' lunchboxes, Dubus cuts straight to the heart of things. Here we have a master at the height of his powers, an artist whose work "is suffused with grace, bathed in a kind of spiritual glow" (The New York Times Book Review).

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #207386 in Books
• Published on: 1999-04-06
• Released on: 1999-04-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Amazon.com 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 Publishers Weekly
The 1986 highway accident that resulted in Dubus being largely confined to a wheelchair is an event that is by now familiar to readers of his award-winning short stories (Dancing After Hours, etc.) and previous collection of personal essays (Broken Vessels, 1991). In these 25 spare and luminous essays, most of which have previously appeared in magazines like the New Yorker, Harper's and Yankee, the author lingers over experiences past and present, from the everyday trials of life in a wheelchair to his thoughts on being a writer, a divorced Catholic and father. "Song of Pity" combines simmering rage at public indifference to the handicapped ("newspaper[s] would not review a restaurant that was accessible only to Caucasians, or only to men") with recollections of an earlier time when he was the one pushing a wheelchair: "I spoke to the back of his head, and he spoke to the cold air in front of him." Other essays recall his encounters as a young writer with Kurt Vonnegut and Ralph Ellison in Iowa City, and Norman Mailer, whom he meets at the Algonquin during a whirlwind trip to New York to meet with his editor in 1967. In Dubus's sharply distilled prose, these meditations are as starkly tangible as they are resonant, providing a vision of his own life before and after the accident, a life united finally by a passion for love, life and craft.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
"I mourn this, and I sing in gratitude for loving this," Dubus (Dancing After Hours, LJ 2/15/96) writes of running year-round on country roads and up "Agony Hill" in one of the excellent and poignant essays (many previously published) contained in this slim volume. Touching on subjects from his sister's search for forgiveness after being raped, to the ethics of writing and publishing, to his complicated reaction to meeting a woman who saw the accident that confined him to a wheelchair, the collection murmurs deep sorrow, subtle joy, and fragile acceptance. Dubus's simple prose gently nurses profound meaning from the most daily of events, bringing him time and again to moments in his life when he failed to live up to Mailer's ideal that, as Dubus puts it, "it is better to be a good man than a good writer." In fact, these essays show that Dubus is both. Highly recommended for all libraries.?Rebecca Miller, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

I loved the man who was full of grace
Although he always wrote pencil to paper, I do not think he would object to a tribute on the net.

Andre Dubus was my friend. I attended his wake, funeral and "time" this past weekend. We were buddies that shared a common living space...the campus of Bradford College. He lived in a townhouse out back, I was the dorm director for Academy Hall.. We went to the Red Sox together, we walked down the placid evening summer street to Ronnie D's on more than one occasion...oh, the tranquil nights, the botanical paradise where we stopped to sniff the lucious bushes and trees and shrubs that Dick Broadhurst had taught us to appreciate...

My heart is broken, I cannot imagine Andre not walking this planet, I cannot do without the wisdom and grace that made ME important because he was my friend.

The funeral, a simple Catholic mass, was missing the most important ingredient...I remember the many occasions when Andre was elected to be the speaker, to put our grief into eloquent words... Carolina Arria, the beautiful flower of Argentina was remembered as a cara mia...Jim Valhouli, the man who emphasized Andre's grace was his treaure...Tony DeLuca the frog sandwich...no one escaped his discerning eye.

I sit here and weep at 5"00 a.m. not knowing how to put this behind me. As a member of alcoholics anonimous Iam taught to let go and let god... why is it so difficult for me and the hundreds of people at that church who wept as Rebecca Paris sang "The Lush Life" to let go?

We are all a product of his munificence...I will write a letter to the kids and his beautiful sisters that I know they will understand...I will contribute to the Homeless Shelter for veterans because my husband is a Vietnam combat Marine who persuaded Andre to don his Combat Cover one wonderful night last November...

Andre, I miss deep sea fishing with you...the drive past Brown's (full of penanace)...the revolution and moratorium...the fish you brought over to Inge's house that night...we were little devils and then you reformed.

Hail Mary, full of Grace...now and at the hour of our death...

I wish this was not so spontaneous, you deserve a more fitting tribute.

Excelsior Andre! Love, Mary P.

P.S. I encourage the friends and admirers of Andre to write and comfort me, to share their thoughts and keep the church going. MJPCRP@aol.com

The piece on Sacraments is alone worth the price of the book
To enter the world of another mind is to discover we are all of one mind. Andre Dubus makes this possible by minding the business of living. Each grief, loss, and puzzlement he experiences is faced full on, letting us see how the prosaic details speak larger meanings when veiwed from the perspective of faith: life has meaning when I accept as a gift what I don't understand.

I will introduce Mr.Dubus' books more in Japan.
13 years ago, in 1987, I met Mr. Dubus at Charles Hotel, Boston. I was 27 years old and stayed at Bradford College as an international student. After coming back home, I approached several publishers to issue Mr. Dubus' excellent books in Japanese. In 1992, I could accomplish to publish his beatiful novellas and stories in three books. I was so happy to introduce his work for Japanese readers. Mr. Dubus was happy too, and wrote to me about his impressions.

Time has gone.

I heard the news of his death just two days ago. Beyond grief, I'm going to read deeply this book and translate from English to Japanese, and then introduce his works to Japanese readers more, certainly.

I would like to visit Haverhill at the anniversary of his death. I pray for the repose of Mr. Dubus' soul.