Meditations from a Movable Chair

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).

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