“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.”
“Tender, dazzling, heart-stopping fiction from a master of deep truths and unexpected turns…This collection provides a clean, swift tour through Wolff’s famous earlier stories and ends with ten new ones, each a more polished gem than the last…Intensely pleasurable.” —Vince Passaro, O, The Oprah Magazine
“[Tobias Wolff] writes with the exacting precision of a bombmaker. With steady hands and sinister ambitions, he crafts his best fictions in miniature, detonating his characters’ lives in the time it takes to read a paragraph, crafting tales that turn on a single, diabolical sentence…Wolff’s stories are filled with such distillations of intense, life-altering moments, and Our Story Begins presents the best examples from his past quarter century of writing.” —Joe Woodward, Poets & Writers
“Wolff dexterously probes, in immaculately clear prose, the core of ordinary people’s passions and vulnerabilities.” —Brad Hooper, Booklist
“[Our Story Begins] exhibits classic richness and depth, and it’s built to last…An impressive range of contemporary experience is distilled into crisp, urgent little dramas.” —Kirkus Reviews
Tobias Wolff is the author of seven previous books and the editor of The Vintage Book of American Short Stories. Among his honors are the PEN/Malamud Award and the Rea Award, both for excellence in the short story, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the PEN/Faulkner Award. He lives in Northern California and teaches at Stanford University.
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
