num_pages: 400
description: 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 Wolffs 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 hes written a third collection The Night in Question as well as a pair of genre-defining memoirs (This Boys Life and In Pharaohs Army) the novella The Barracks Thief and most recently a novel Old School.Now he returns with fresh revelationsabout biding ones time or experiencing first love or burying ones motherthat 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 whos 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.
language: English
title: Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories
publisher: Knopf