Tobias Wolff

The author of the genre-defining memoir This Boy's Life, the PEN/Faulkner Award--winning novella The Barracks Thief, and short stories acclaimed as modern classics, Tobias Wolff now gives us his first novel.Determined to fit in at his New England prep school, the narrator has learned to mimic the bearing and manners of his adoptive tribe while concealing as much as possible about himself. His final year, however, unravels everything he's achieved, and steers his destiny in directions no one could have predicted. The school's mystique is rooted in Literature, and for many boys this becomes an obsession, editing the review and competing for the attention of visiting writers whose fame helps to perpetuate the tradition. Robert Frost, soon to appear at JFK's inauguration, is far less controversial than the next visitor, Ayn Rand. But the final guest is one whose blessing a young writer would do almost anything to gain.No one writes more astutely than Wolff about the process by which character is formed, and here he illuminates the irresistible power, even the violence, of the self-creative urge. Resonant in ways at once contemporary and timeless, Old School is a masterful achievement by one of the finest writers of our time.From the Hardcover edition.

Fourteen stories on a variety of subjects. In Firelight, a woman and her son visit apartments for rent even though they have no money to rent them, in A Bullet in the Head a bystander gets shot for heckling a robber, and in Chain a man revenging himself for a dog biting his daughter starts a chain of violence.

In Pharaoh's Army is Tobias Wolff's unflinching account of his tour in Vietnam, his tangled journey there and back. Using his old wiles and talents, he passes through boot camp, trains as a paratrooper, volunteers for the Special Forces, studies Vietnamese, and - without really believing it himself - becomes an officer in the U.S. Army. Then, inexorably, he finds himself drawn into the war, sent to the Mekong Delta as adviser to a Vietnamese battalion. More or less innocent, self-deluded but rapidly growing less so, he dedicates himself not to victory but to survival. For despite his impressive credentials, he recognizes in himself laughably little aptitude for the military life and no taste at all for the war. He ricochets between boredom and terror and grief for lost friends; then and in the years to come, he reckons the cost of staying alive. A superb memoir of war, In Pharaoh's Army is an intimate recounting of the central event of our recent past. Once again Tobias Wolff has combined the art of the best fiction and the immediacy of personal history - with authority, humanity, and sure conviction.

Offers a collection of short stories that combines, in mostly domestic settings, intense feeling with wild imagination and familiar situations with extraordinary events.

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."

The Book of Miracles (from The Dew Breaker) / Edwidge Danticat -- The Postman's Cottage (from The Hill Road) / Patrick O'Keeffe -- My Podiatrist Tells Me a Story About a Boy and a Dog (from The Stories of Mary Gordon) / Mary Gordon -- The Zero Meter Diving Team (from Like You'd Understand, Anyway) / Jim Shepard -- Bullet in the Brain (from Our Story Begins) / Tobias Wolff -- Saleema (from In Other Rooms, Other Wonders) / Daniyal Mueenuddin -- Memory Wall (from Memory Wall) / Anthony Doerr -- Snowmen (from In the Penny Arcade) / Steven Millhauser -- Ghosts, Cowboys (from Battleborn) / Claire Vaye Watkins -- Tenth of December (from Tenth of December) / George Saunders -- Something Amazing (from Thunderstruck & Other Stories) / Elizabeth McCracken -- Nirvana (from Fortune Smiles) / Adam Johnson -- How She Remembers It (from For a Little While) / Rick Bass -- The Sign (from Anything Is Possible) / Elizabeth Strout.

30 amerikanische und europaische Erzähler auf einen Blick: Generationenvertreter, deren Haltungen zu literarischen Traditionen genauso widersprüchlich und interessant sind wie ihr Erfahrungshunger und ihre Themen es sind. Erzählungen und Romanauszüge von Lisa Alther, Martin Amis, Paul Auster, René Belletto, William Boyd, Françoise Bouillot, Peter Carey, Jean-Claude Charles, Liane Dirks, Jean Echenoz, Deborah Eisenberg, Bret Easton Ellis, Louise Erdrich, Martin Groß, Hervé Guibert, Lisbet Hiide, Christoph Klimke, David Leavitt, Adam Mars-Jones, Susan Minot, Christa Moog, Lorrie Moore, Craig Nova, Marcelo Rubens Paiva, Alina Reyes, Christa Schmidt, Irini Spanidou, Pier Vittorio Tondelli, Christof Wackernagel un Tobias Wolff, die beeindrucken und dem Leser im Kopf bleiben. 30 Autoren unter 40, deren Texte zeigen, daß es sie überall auf der Welt gibt: die Besten von morgen.

The thirty-three stories in this generous and discerning volume prove that American short fiction may be our most distinctive national art form. As selected and introduced by Tobias Wolff, they also make up an alternate map of the United States, one that represents not just geography but narrative traditions, cultural heritage, and divergent approaches to the use of language. - Back cover.