Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories Book

â??One of our most exquisite storytellersâ? (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 Wolffâ??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 â??provoke our amazed appreciation,â? as The New York Times Book Review wrote then. In the years since, heâ??s written a third collection, The Night in Question, as well as a pair of genre-defining memoirs (This Boyâ??s Life and In Pharaohâ??s Army), the novella The Barracks Thief, and, most recently, a novel, Old School.Now he returns with fresh revelationsâ??about biding oneâ??s time, or experiencing first love, or burying oneâ??s motherâ??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 whoâ??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, â??a writer of the highest order: part storyteller, part philosopher, someone deeply engaged in asking hard questions that take a lifetime to resolve.â?Read More