certain breed of writers remains under the street lamp of the known. Their prose has the familiar cadences of everyday talk, but a speech revealing a graver, more intimate self-knowledge, as if it emerged from the soul. It reflects the way we make sense of the world, the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. While their more audacious literary brethren work at the edge of control, hurling words ahead of themselves like hieroglyphs, the realists remain tethered to experiences they can name. They work inward, making their way slowly into the mystery of their hearts. Sometimes they speak in cliches, but beneath their sentences' most mundane surfaces roil depths they have charted inch by inch. They sum up their lives as if they could be summed up, as one does when speaking to a lover or a priest. Their stock in trade is truth. They aim at transparency. They are to be judged not so much by the height of their imagination as by the depth of their sincerity. This is the style that Andre Dubus, whose new collection of short stories, "Dancing After Hours," has just been published by Knopf, has mastered, and that has made him one of the great psychological realists among contemporary writers of short fiction. It is not a voice that will immediately appeal to those who like their sentences red-hot. It lacks rhetorical sizzle, and its quotidian omniscience, its even, quietly lyrical, familiar tone, seems to link it uncomfortably to the middlebrow, to the realm of received ideas. But it endures, a steady literary tortoise when the hares have run off the track. And it goes deep: Nakedness allows no equivocation. At times Dubus' writing almost resembles a kind of imaginative therapy session: It is as if he had decided that only by enacting the most painful and intimate emotional moments in life could he learn their lessons. Indeed, throughout his career Dubus has created such an enduring, profoundly decent persona that the reader feels certain that he knows the man himself. And, perhaps more important, that he likes him.

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