Dancing after hours : stories

A New York Times Notable Book of the YearFrom 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. 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. Fourteen stories whose protagonists wrestle with love, faith, and luck. In The Lover, a man in his fifties falls in love with a girl younger than his daughter, A Love Song is on the pain of divorce, and The Colonel's Wife is on the repercussions of a man's physical injury on a marriage. By the author of Broken Vessels A collection of fourteen short stories explores the unseen mysteries of everyday life as people caught in a wide variety of circumstances contend with the perversities of love, faith, luck, and fate.