Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories » (Bargain)

Best known for his short stories and his autobiographical writing, Tobias Wolff riveted readers and held them fast with This Boy's Life, a groundbreaking literary memoir that redefined the genre for an entire generation.

This collection of stories—twenty-one classics followed by ten potent new stories—displays Tobias Wolff's exquisite gifts over a quarter century.

The Barnes & Noble Review

In his collection Our Story Begins, Tobias Wolff s stories more often than not begin by catching people in what seem to be mundane, routine positions. They launch with almost deliberate flatness. "My friend Clark and I had decided to build a jet plane," starts one. "They were doing the dishes, his wife washing as he dried," begins another. "On her thirtieth birthday, Ted threw a surprise party for Helen." In openings that deftly infer an ordinary world around them, Wolff s lights come up on familiar people, in familiar places: They live in small towns on the West Coast. They are stuck driving somewhere they do not want to go. They are doing cocaine for a friend s birthday. They are going hunting. They are building an airplane with a new friend but stop to visit an old one. They are driving cross-country to try to start a new life. It is Wolff s gift to enter these worlds in a plainspoken way, one that seems matter of fact, but nonetheless determines a great deal quickly. Take the sentences with which Wolff s entire collection launches: "When she was young, Mary saw a brilliant and original man lose his job because he had expressed ideas that were offensive to the trustees of the college where they both taught. She shared his views but did not sign the petition. She was, after all, on trial herself -- as a teacher, as a woman, as an interpreter of history."

A Note from the Author

SELECTED STORIES

In the Garden of the North American Martyrs
Next Door
Hunters in the Snow
The Liar
Soldier’s Joy
The Rich Brother
Leviathan
Desert Breakdown, 1968
Say Yes
Mortals
Flyboys
Sanity
The Other Miller
Two Boys and a Girl
The Chain
Smorgasbord
Lady’s Dream
Powder
The Night in Question
Firelight
Bullet in the Brain

NEW STORIES

That Room
Awaiting Orders
A White Bible
Her Dog
A Mature Student
The Deposition
Down to Bone
Nightingale
The Benefit of the Doubt
Deep Kiss