Product Description

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year

From a genuine hero of the American short story comes a luminous collection that reveals the seams of hurt, courage, and tenderness that run through the bedrock of contemporary American life. In these fourteen stories, Dubus depicts ordinary men and women confronting injury and loneliness, the lack of love and the terror of actually having it. Out of his characters' struggles and small failures--and their unexpected moments of redemption--Dubus creates fiction that bears comparison to the short story's greatest creators--Chekhov, Raymond Carver, Flannery O'Connor.

"A master of the short story...It's good to have Andre Dubus back. More than ever, he is an object of hope."--Philadelphia Inquirer


"Dubus's detailed creation of three-dimensional characters is propelled by his ability to turn a quiet but perfect phrase...[This] kind of writing raises gooseflesh of admiration."--San Francisco Chronicle

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #95771 in Books
• Published on: 1997-03-04
• Released on: 1997-03-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Amazon.com Review
Over two decades, Andre Dubus has proven himself an essential American writer. "He restores faith in the survival of the short story" (Los Angeles Times), and now - with his first collection in nearly ten years - he demonstrates more powerfully than ever before both his mastery of the form and his understanding of our imperfect lives. In each of the fourteen stories in Dancing After Hours, Dubus uncovers the mystery of ordinary life as his characters - often perseverant, yet occasionally crazed by desire, loss, or disappointment - wrestle with love, faith, and luck. Whether at a roadside bar or a family camp, in the everyday rigors of domesticity or its violent extremes, these lives unfold with an inevitability that is moving, sometimes redemptive, always surprising.

From Publishers Weekly
Dubus's (Broken Vessels) first story collection in nearly a decade centers around the concerns that have informed all his writing: spirituality, Catholicism, adultery, love and the difficult attempt to sustain it through marriage and family-and, more broadly, the ways lives can suddenly change, sometimes with sudden cruelty, sometimes with grace. Two stories among the 14 here are particularly fine; both gain resonance from the way Dubus's own life was affected by a tragic accident. They are "The Colonel's Wife," about a retired Marine whose relationship with his wife is altered in complex and surprising ways after he breaks both his legs when his horse falls; and the magnificent title story, which concerns a man turned into a quadriplegic by a freak diving mishap, but whose continued zest for life helps bring other people together. Also very strong are the four stories that chronicle the lives of Ted Briggs and LuAnn Arceneaux, and their love for one another, by portraying their lives before they've met and tracing them through a decade of marriage. Dubus's material can be seen as either slightly old-fashioned or as timeless, particularly since he is unapologetically concerned with the spiritual and religious health of his characters. Hopefully, this collection will serve to introduce this important and consistently fine writer to the wider audience he has always deserved.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Scientific American
Dubus's detailed creation of three-dimensional characters is propelled by his ability to turn a quiet but perfect phrase.... [This] kind of writing raises gooseflesh of admiration.

Customer Reviews

This book explores physical decline in all it's myriad aspects
If you want to know what it would be like to lose the use of your legs, read this book.

In a sparse, Faulknerian style Dubus evokes an emotional landscape that has been violated by pyhsical injury or tainted by advancing age and the inevitable degradation of the body that comes in its wake.

Although not every story has at its focus this troubling theme, the penumbra of death and disfiguration permeates the collection.

For Dubus, the transition beyond youth and physical splendor is accompanied primarily by a nostalgic longing for past pleasures which are understood as being now out of reach. But the book ultimately rinses through you with a power that leaves you meditating, as the author once did, about the realities that must be faced by all of us for the simple fact that we inhabit bodies that have a trajectory which sooner lr later commands our full attention.

Beautiful
I am in complete awe of Andre Dubus. His passing away last week is a great loss to the writing community. I highly recommend everything he has ever written.

Carver's brevity and Gallagher's heart.
Great stories, some related, always with a sense of loss and redemption. Real insights into the cost of happiness and the benefits or sacrifice and passion.