Dancing After Hours: Stories [Hardcover]

Andre Dubus (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 13, 1996

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.

Editorial Reviews

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.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 233 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1st edition (February 13, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679431071
• ISBN-13: 978-0679431077
• Product Dimensions: 3.4 x 2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,793,861 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Andre Dubus (1936-1999) is considered one of the greatest American short story writers of the twentieth century. His collections of short fiction, which include Adultery & Other Choices (1977), The Times Are Never So Bad (1983), and The Last Worthless Evening (1986), are notable for their spare prose and illuminative, albeit subtle, insights into the human heart. He is often compared to Anton Chekhov and revered as a "writer's writer."

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book explores physical decline in all it's myriad aspects, March 10, 1999

By 

Dr Lawrence Hauser (NYC, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Dancing After Hours: Stories (Paperback)

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.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful, March 1, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Dancing After Hours: Stories (Hardcover)

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.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars THIS IS YOUR LIFE, August 4, 2001

By 

Sesho "www.sesho.libsyn.com" (Pasadena, TX USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dancing After Hours: Stories (Hardcover)

After finishing this collection of stories I am asking myself just how good was it? The hype on the back of the book compares Dubus to Chekhov, Carver, and Flannery O'Connor. It might be that good. As you're reading the stories, most of which are about spiritual crises, or the equivalent, you begin to see the universality in these microcosms of life. The writer and the characters draw you into a quest for meaning and a struggle to reach into the past and change everything you regret. There are a couple of running characters in the stories who give a collection already united by theme the feel of a novel. Some of the best stories are "Blessings", in which a woman tries to sort through her emotions of a fishing trip in which the boat sank. Her family had to fend off shark attacks until they were rescued. It's a great combination of remembrance and violence. Also, "All the Time in the World" in which a woman is desperately trying to find a husband, not just a lover. I could go on for a 1,000 words about the beauty of the prose of each story but I won't. Suffice it to say that when you read these stories you see yourself reflected back through them or, if not personally, through the experience of someone you know. Whether its the questioning of existence, an affair, the senselessness of corporate America, crime, adolescence, love, regret, or physical disability. Every person seems represented here, like some great Walt Whitman poem singing the unity of everything and everyone. There was only one story that I had trouble with and it involved a woman fighting off two thugs who followed her home to rob or rape her. The way the action was described it seemed like the screenplay for some bad japanese karate movie. And sometimes it seemed as though Dubus uses the setting of a story just as background. It doesnt really matter to the telling of the story but he spends paragraphs describing what's going on as the characters walk and talk for example. I understand that he was trying to show the indifference of the outside world to the internal problems of the characters but it got a little old. But these are minor complaints. Overall, it was a great collection, which settles my own question about how good it was.