“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 Martyrs
and
Back in the World,
were a powerful demonstration of how the short story can “provoke our amazed appreciation,” as
The New York Times Book Review
wrote 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 Life
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.”