Tobias Wolff

In a new collection of short stories by the acclaimed author of This Boy's Life and In Pharoah's Army, one man is shot while waiting in a bank line, another is fired for writing a premature obituary, and a woman visits her father after his mental breakdown. 30,000 first printing. Tour.

Stories

The Night in Question

It's 1960, in America, at a prestigious boys' public school, a place of privilege that places great emphasis on its democratic ideals. A teenage boy in his final year, on a scholarship, has 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 admitting a piece of writing and the winner having 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 hold dear - honour, loyalty and friendship - are 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. This is a novel that, in its power and its beauty, in its precision and its humanity, is at once contemporary and timeless.

Old School

The author recalls his experiences during the Vietnam war, reminiscing about his service in the Mekong Delta, his feelings about the miltary life, and the impact of the Vietnam experience on his life

Memories of the Lost War

In Pharaoh's Army

A collection of short stories features the work of Carol Bly, Ann Beattie, Allan Gurganus, Joyce Carol Oates, and others

The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories

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."

In The Garden Of The North American Martyrs

Bullet in the Brain

The Barracks Thief is the story of three young paratroopers waiting to be shipped out to Vietnam. Brought together one sweltering afternoon to stand guard over an ammunition dump threatened by a forest fire, they discover in each other an unexpected capacity for recklessness and violence. Far from being alarmed by this discovery, they are exhilarated by it; they emerge from their common danger full of confidence in their own manhood and in the bond of friendship they have formed. This confidence is shaken when a series of thefts occur. The author embraces the perspectives of both the betrayer and the betrayed, forcing us to participate in lives that we might otherwise condemn, and to recognize the kinship of those lives to our own.

The Barracks Thief

With fresh revelations, one of our most exquisite storytellers ("Esquire") delivers his first collection in over a decade: ten potent new tales that, along with 21 classics, display his mastery over a quarter century.

New and Selected Stories

Our Story Begins

Ten potent new stories that, along with twenty-one classics, display Wolff's mastery over a quarter century.

new and selected stories

Our story begins

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." "Terrific...The magic of his fiction cannot be explained. It is the ancient art of the master storyteller."--Tim O'Brien

Back in the World

A memoir of a young boy's unusual travels with his mother. The author recreates his boyhood experiences, relating how he and his mother travelled throughout the United States, and tracing his experiences and changes from young boy to manhood against the background of a violent and wildly optimistic America.

This Boy's Life

This Boys Life

Night In Question

Harry Crews

The Biography of a Place

A Childhood

Flyboys

Hikâyemiz Burada Başlıyor

‘Wolff’s collection takes us from north to south, from east to west, from ocean to desert to forest, from farmstead to city, from suburb to main streets, from home to Vietnamese jungle; its diversity is as impressive as its quality. It’s a substantial achievement: an engrossing, affecting, provoking, richly satisfying volume, the magic of which will endure even when it’s lost the “contemporary” in its title’ Scotsman ‘There can be no more readable book . . . More than seven hundred pages of mesmeric story-telling, by forty-two of the best writers to have emerged from the US over the past fifteen years . . . This is a wonderful book’ Scotland on Sunday ‘In making his choice of contemporary American short stories, Tobias Wolff has remained true to what he believes is the predominantly realist strain of American fiction . . . this is a thick, satisfying volume: I can’t find a story that hits a wrong note’ Erica Wagner, The Times

The Picador Book of Contemporary American Stories

This unforgettable memoir, by one of our most gifted writers, introduces us to the young Toby Wolff, by turns tough and vulnerable, crafty and bumbling, and ultimately winning. Separated by divorce from his father and brother, Toby and his mother are constantly on the move, yet they develop an extraordinarily close, almost telepathic relationship. As Toby fights for identity and self-respect against the unrelenting hostility of a new stepfather, his experiences are at once poignant and comical, and Wolff does a masterful job of re-creating the frustrations and cruelties of adolescence. His various schemes - running away to Alaska, forging checks, and stealing cars - lead eventually to an act of outrageous self-invention that releases him into a new world of possibility.

A Memoir

The debut title in Ecco's the art of the Story Series—a collection of twelve short works of fiction that showcase Tobias Wolff's extraordinary craft In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, Tobias Wolff's first collection of short fiction, hailed the arrival of a major talent and the beginning of an acclaimed, bestselling career. In each of these sharply crafted stories, his characters, drawn from everyday life, stumble over each other in their baffled yet resolute search for the "right path." Among the characters in these twelve stories 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 endures the offensive conviviality of the ship's social director.

Tobias Wolff

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