| Andre Dubus Reads New Novel TOWNIE |
The Music Hall and RiverRun Bookstore announce the first event in their new Writers in the Loft series. National Book Award finalist author Andre Dubus III, the author of the novels House of Sand and Fog and The Garden of Last Days, will present his new work of nonfiction Townie on April 13th at 7pm. (Continued below)
Both reading and book signing receptions will take place at the newly opened Music Hall Loft at
Writers in the Loft is akin to The Music Hall’s anchor author series, Writers on a New England Stage, featuring well-known authors but in a smaller, more intimate space. It is produced as a partnership between The Music Hall and RiverRun Bookstore with sponsor Citizens Bank. The series will bring audiences today’s top authors, the best of fiction and nonfiction.
Executive Producer Patricia Lynch says of Writers in the Loft, “The spirit will be unique and casual… With just 120 in the room, audience members will feel they are at a happening, a cross between a seminar and a social event.” Tom Holbrook, owner of RiverRun Bookstore, said of Dubus, “Last time he came to town, we had standing room only at the bookstore and he wowed every person there. We can't wait to have him back!”
About the book, TOWNIE
In Townie Andre Dubus III tells the story of growing up on the wrong side of town, in a neighborhood and in schools saturated with drugs and violence, where he built himself up from a scared, skinny kid to a guy who could—and did—send other men to the hospital with one punch to the face. Watching his siblings suffer, in different ways, from the trouble that surrounded them, he began pumping iron to make himself the kind of man who could protect them, and himself.
Meanwhile, his father – the acclaimed short fiction writer Andre Dubus – lived and taught creative writing on a nearby college campus and, in a typical 1970s post-divorce custody arrangement, took the kids out on Sundays. His father’s world and his own were so incongruous that his father’s students gossiped that Professor Dubus’s son was “such a townie!” Yet young Andre couldn’t deny the affirmation he felt when his father was riveted by stories of his brawls and seemed proud of his son’s toughness, fascinated by the everyday violence his son took for granted.
While he was able to steer clear of the drugs so easily available in rough neighborhoods called “the avenues,” young Andre nonetheless developed a dangerous habit of intervening to save the underdog. Knocking out a guy who was bullying his smaller friend in a parking lot, breaking the teeth of a troublemaker who had just kicked a woman in an airport – using his fists to “break through the membrane” separating one individual from another threatened to become a deadly end in itself.
To raise money for college – an ambition that pleased his dad but that mystified his friends at home – young Andre worked as a night manager at a fast food restaurant. He made his way to the
But one day, when Andre was training for the Golden Gloves, he didn’t show up for his sparring session. Instead, he’d begun to write. Finally, this new way of “breaking through the membrane” separating each of us from others gave him another way of dealing with confrontation – an uncanny sense of empathy that empowered him to inhabit his characters with the extraordinary depth familiar to fans of his fiction -- and also to defuse an angry, violent man itching for a fight.
Meanwhile, the accident that left his father permanently confined to a wheelchair had an equally amazing effect on a family still haunted by heartache and childhood deprivation. The empathy both Andres, father and son, expressed in their fiction also shaped them later in their lives, in a kind of miracle that enabled the members of this family to rally around one another, at the same time that it brought the two of them closer together. The extraordinarily beautiful, moving, and redemptive final chapters of Townie capture that relationship, culminating with the death and of Andre Dubus the elder, his funeral attended by 800 admirers, and his burial in the coffin his sons made and the grave they dug for him.
There are many, many writers’ memoirs – but only a few that exhibit the same precious and hard-won self knowledge, or that reach readers on so many levels, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual. Townie is a rare and powerful work that will resonate for years to come.
About the author, Andre Dubus III
Andre Dubus III is a National Book Award finalist and the author of the novels House of Sand and Fog and The Garden of Last Days, a
About the The Music Hall Loft:
Center for Performing Arts, Literature and Education
The Music Hall’s new Loft space at
Ticket Purchase – Writers in the Loft
Tickets to Writers in the Loft; Andre Dubus III on Wedsnesday, April 13 at 7pm, are $37 for members of The Music Hall ($40 for general public). Included in the package are a reserved seat, a copy of Townie (hardcover $25.95), bar beverage; and author presentation, Q+A, and book signing meet-and-greet. Tickets are available through The Music Hall Box Office, located at