Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories

About this book

"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 Martyrsand Back in the World,were a powerful demonstration of how the short story can "provoke our amazed appreciation," as TheNew 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 Lifeand In Pharaoh's Army),the novella The 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 the Los 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."