SOURCE: "Love and Other Choices," in The New York Times Book Review, February 25, 1996, p. 13.

Bausch is an American novelist and short story writer. In the following review, he applauds Dubus's return to short story writing and asserts that Dancing After Hours demonstrates the author's talent in the genre.

I am always amused when writers who have made their careers writing novels start talking about the short story. Often enough, they fall into a kind of polite disparagement of the form and, by extension, of short-story writers as a species. Of course, this isn't new. Thirty years ago, in the introduction to a selection of his short fiction, Norman Mailer likened the short-story writer to a jeweler who "stays in his shop" and "polishes those jewels." He himself, he declared, was not in possession of the "proper awe" to really work at the form. He went on to say...