SOURCE: "Stories from Scratch at Triple Strength," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, November 20, 1988, p. 3.

Eder is an American critic and journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1987. In the following review of Selected Stories, he suggests that Dubus's fiction is sometimes marred by excessive writing.

Like Raymond Carver, Andre Dubus sets his stories largely among the blue-collars and other Americans who confront impossible demands with narrow means.

Unlike the austere and finely voiced Carver, Dubus endows his constricted lives with large-scale emotions. Rage, lust, longing, violence and despair are painted with deep-hued, tumultuous colors in [Selected Stories] this selection of the author's work over the last 15 years.

In one story, a father whose son has been shot dead by the estranged husband of his girlfriend, kidnaps the killer, shoots him and buries him. In another, a wife stabs her husband to death after he has...