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 grapples with his...