4 Books by Tobias Wolff
Requirements: ePUB reader, 950KB
Overview: Tobias Wolff is an American author. He is known for his memoirs, particularly This Boy’s Life (1989), and his short stories. He has also written two novels. He served in the US Army during the Vietnam War era. He holds a First Class Honours degree in English from Hertford College, Oxford and an M.A. from Stanford University. In 1975 he was awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing at Stanford.
Genre: General Fiction/Classics
In the Garden of the North American Martyrs: Short Stories (1981)
Among the characters you’ll find in this collection of twelve stories by Tobias Wolff are a teenage boy who tells morbid lies about his home life, a timid professor who, in the first genuine outburst of her life, pours out her opinions in spite of a protesting audience, a prudish loner who gives an obnoxious hitchhiker a ride, and an elderly couple on a golden anniversary cruise who endure the offensive conviviality of the ship’s social director.
Fondly yet sharply drawn, Wolff’s characters stumble over each other in their baffled yet resolute search for the "right path."
Back in the World: Short Stories (1985)
To American soldiers in Vietnam, "back in the world" meant America and safety. To Tobias Wolff’s characters, Back in the World is where lives that have veered out of control just might become normal again. Unfortunately, the men and women in these gripping, pungent, and wonderfully skewed stories have only the vaguest notion of what normal is. A gentle priest finds himself in a Vegas hotel with a hysterical, sun-burned stranger. A show-biz hopeful undergoes a dubious audition in a hearse speeding across the California desert. An aging soldier is distracted from a night of philandering by a gun-toting neighbor and a suicidal enlisted man. As he moves among these unfortunates, Wolff observes the disparity between their realities and their dreams, in ten stories of exhilarating lucidity and grace.
Stories included are: "The Missing Person," "Say Yes," "The Poor Are Always With Us," "Sister," "Soldier’s Joy," "Desert Breakdown," "Our Story Begins," "Leviathan," and "The Rich Brother."
Old School: A Novel (2003)
It’s 1960, in America, at a prestigious boys’ public school. The school is a place of privilege that yet places great emphasis on its democratic ideals. A teenage boy in his final year at the school, on a scholarship has,during his time there, learned to fit in with his adoptive tribe while concealing as much as possible about himself and his background. Class is ever present, but the only acknowledged snobbery is a literary snobbery. These boys’ heroes are writers – Fitzgerald, cummings, Kerouac. They want to be writers themselves, and the school has a tradition whereby once a term big names from the literary world are invited to visit. A contest takes place with the boys submitting a piece of writing and the winner getting to have a private audience with the visitor. When it is announced that Hemingway will be the next to come to the school, competition among the boys is intense, and the morals the school and the boys pride themselves on – honour, loyalty and friendship – become severely tested. No one writes more astutely than Wolff about the process by which character is formed, and here he illuminates the irresistible strength, even the violence, of the self-creative urge.
Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories (2008)
“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 and 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.”
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