Our story begins - Tobias Wolff

“One of our most exquisite storytellers”(Esquire)gives us his first collection in over a decade: ten potent new stories that, along with twenty-one classics, display his mastery over a quarter century.

Tobias Wolff’s first two books,In the Garden of the North American MartyrsandBack in the World,were a powerful demonstration of how the short story can “provoke our amazed appreciation,” asTheNew York Times Book Reviewwrote then. In the years since, he’s written a third collection,The Night in Question,as well as a pair of genre-defining memoirs(This Boy’s LifeandIn Pharaoh’s Army),the novellaThe Barracks Thief,and, most recently, a novel,Old School.

Now he returns with fresh revelations—about biding one’s time, or experiencing first love, or burying one’s mother—that come to a variety of characters in circumstances at once everyday and extraordinary: a retired Marine enrolled in college while her son trains for Iraq, a lawyer taking a difficult deposition, an American in Rome indulging the Gypsy who’s picked his pocket. In these stories, as with his earlier, much-anthologized work, he once again proves himself, according to theLos Angeles Times,“a writer of the highest order: part storyteller, part philosopher, someone deeply engaged in asking hard questions that take a lifetime to resolve.”