Our Story Begins

Our Story Begins PDF Author: Tobias Wolff
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1400095972
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 402

Get Book Here

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

Old School

Old School PDF Author: Tobias Wolff
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0375701494
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 210

Get Book Here

Book Description
The protagonist of Tobias Wolff’s shrewdly—and at times devastatingly—observed first novel is a boy at an elite prep school in 1960. He is an outsider who has learned to mimic the negligent manner of his more privileged classmates. Like many of them, he wants more than anything on earth to become a writer. But to do that he must first learn to tell the truth about himself. The agency of revelation is the school literary contest, whose winner will be awarded an audience with the most legendary writer of his time. As the fever of competition infects the boy and his classmates, fraying alliances, exposing weaknesses, Old School explores the ensuing deceptions and betrayals with an unblinking eye and a bottomless store of empathy. The result is further evidence that Wolff is an authentic American master.

Our Story Begins

Our Story Begins PDF Author: Tobias Wolff
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1400095972
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 402

Get Book Here

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

The Night In Question

The Night In Question PDF Author: Tobias Wolff
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307763749
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Get Book Here

Book Description
One of the sinuous and subtly crafted stories in Tobias Wolff's new collection--his first in eleven years--begins with a man biting a dog. The fact that Wolff is reversing familiar expectations is only half the point. The other half is that Wolff makes the reversal seem inevitable: the dog has attacked his protagonist's young daughter. And everywhere in The Night in Question, we are reminded that truth is deceptive, volatile, and often the last thing we want to know. A young reporter writes an obituary only to be fired when its subject walks into his office, very much alive. A soldier in Vietnam goads his lieutenant into sending him on increasingly dangerous missions. An impecunious mother and son go window-shopping for a domesticity that is forever beyond their grasp. Seamless, ironic, dizzying in their emotional aptness, these fifteen stories deliver small, exquisite shocks that leave us feeling invigorated and intensely alive.

This Boy's Life

This Boy's Life PDF Author: Tobias Wolff
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
ISBN: 0802198600
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Get Book Here

Book Description
The PEN/Faulkner Award–winning author recounts coming of age in 1950s Washington State with his mother and abusive stepfather in this classic memoir. 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. As he fights for identity and self-respect against the unrelenting hostility of a new stepfather, his experiences are at once poignant and comical, and Wolff masterfully re-creates the frustrations, cruelties, and joys 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. Praise for This Boy’s Life “Wolff writes in language that is lyrical without embellishment, defines his characters with exact strokes and perfectly pitched voices, [and] creates suspense around ordinary events, locating the deep mystery within them.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review “[This] extraordinary memoir is so beautifully written that we not only root for the kid Wolff remembers, but we also are moved by the universality of his experience.” —San Francisco Chronicle “A work of genuine literary art . . . as grim and eerie as Great Expectations, as surreal and cruel as The Painted Bird, as comic and transcendent as Huckleberry Finn.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer “Wolff’s genius is in his fine storytelling. This Boy’s Life reads and entertains as easily as a novel. Wolff’s writing and timing are superb, as are his depictions of those of us who endured the 50s.” —The Oregonian

Back in the World

Back in the World PDF Author: Tobias Wolff
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0679767967
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 229

Get Book Here

Book Description
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

Matters of Life and Death

Matters of Life and Death PDF Author: Tobias Wolff
Publisher: Green Harbor, MA : Wampeter Press
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Get Book Here

Book Description


In Pharaoh's Army

In Pharaoh's Army PDF Author: Tobias Wolff
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307763757
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Get Book Here

Book Description
Whether he is evoking the blind carnage of the Tet offensive, the theatrics of his fellow Americans, or the unraveling of his own illusions, Wolff brings to this work the same uncanny eye for detail, pitiless candor and mordant wit that made This Boy's Life a modern classic.

Old School

Old School PDF Author: Tobias Wolff
Publisher: Bloomsbury Paperbacks
ISBN: 9780747574651
Category : Authors
Languages : en
Pages : 195

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

The Barracks Thief

The Barracks Thief PDF Author: Tobias Wolff
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062376888
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 64

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

In the Garden of the North American Martyrs

In the Garden of the North American Martyrs PDF Author: Tobias Wolff
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061868221
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 196

Get Book Here

Book Description
A collection from the Story Prize and PEN/Faulkner Award winner and author of This Boy’s Life, “a writer of the highest order” (Los Angeles Times). 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 this collection that the San Francisco Chronicle called “one of the most impressive debuts in recent memory.” “Tobias Wolff is a captivating, brilliant writer, one of the best we’ve got.” —Annie Dillard “A masterful storyteller, a natural raconteur.” —Michiko Kakutani “I have not read a book of stories in years that has given me such a shock of amazement and recognition—and such pleasure.” —Raymond Carver