Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories - Tapa dura

'Wolff is the greatest living exponent of the form of the short story' MAIL ON SUNDAY 'Wolff takes characters and scenarios much loved by American short story writers - but in each case sheds a new and unexpected light on familiar territory' TIME OUT 'Like Chekhov, Wolff enjoys the formalities of moral dilemmas. The tone of Wolff's prose is remarkable and difficult to pin down: a combination of agony, formality and wit' INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY 'What really sets Wolff apart is the imaginative sympathy and moral generosity he extends to his characters. Children and parents, soldiers and schoolteachers, nurses, store-owners, hopeful suitors, cynical critics, all come together in these luminous tales, misunderstanding one another, concealing or confessing things that will in some way alter their lives' DAILY TELEGRAPH

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' (New York Times Book Review). 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.'