Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Dubus, Andre (Vol. 97) - Ellen Lesser (review date 17 January 1989)

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Ellen Lesser (review date 17 January 1989)

SOURCE: "True Confessions," in The Village Voice, Vol. XXXIV, No. 3, January 17, 1989, p. 56.

[In the following excerpt, Lesser discusses the depth of characterization in Dubus's Selected Stories.]

"Rose" is an exceptionally intense and difficult story, but it isn't exceptional among the Selected Stories of Andre Dubus. Several of these nearly two dozen works take as their subjects "crimes of passion." Even when homicide isn't an option or issue, Dubus's fiction depicts a world of high personal stakes; the stories track characters in pain, in precarious transition, in extremis. An angry ex-husband takes to terrorizing his former wife, while she buys a handgun and readies herself to use it against him. A townie beats his lover from the local college to death after she's told him she needs to stop seeing him. A bartender looks helplessly on as a group of bikers gang-rapes a young woman, then...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Gene Lyons (review date 26 February 1977)
   2. Anatole Broyard (review date 20 November 1977)
   3. Gilberto Perez (essay date Winter 1980–81)
   4. William H. Pritchard (essay date Winter 1983–84)
   5. Andre Dubus with Thomas Kennedy (interview date ca. 1985)
   6. Steve Yarbrough (essay date Fall 1986)
   7. Paul Gray (review date 10 November 1986)
   8. Joseph J. Feeney (essay date 15 November 1986)
   9. Andre Dubus with Patrick H. Samway (interview date 15 November 1986)
   10. Art Seidenbaum (review date 23 November 1986)
   11. Clancy Sigal (review date 21 December 1986)
   12. Jack Sullivan (review date 11 January 1987)
   13. Ellen Lesser (review date 20 January 1987)
   14. Thomas E. Kennedy (essay date February 1987)
   15. Eva Hoffman (review date 6 November 1988)
   16. Richard Eder (review date 20 November 1988)
   17. John B. Breslin (essay date 2 December 1988)
   18. Ellen Lesser (review date 17 January 1989)
   19. Anne Tyler (review date 6 February 1989)
   20. Freddie Baveystock (review date 6-12 April 1990)
   21. Leonard Kriegel (review date 11 August 1991)
   22. Mark Hummel (review date October-November 1991)
   23. David Toolan (review date 22 November 1991)
   24. Publishers Weekly (review date 1 January 1996)
   25. Doris Lynch (review date 15 February 1996)
   26. Richard Bausch (review date 25 February 1996)
   27. Mark Shechner (review date 10 March 1996)
   28. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt (review date 14 March 1996)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright