Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories

&quot;One of our most exquisite storytellers&quot; <i>(Esquire) </i> 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.<br><br>Tobias Wolff's first two books, <i>In the Garden of the North American Martyrs</i> and <i>Back in the World,</i> were a powerful demonstration of how the short story can &quot;provoke our amazed appreciation,&quot; as <i>The</i> <i>New York Times Book Review</i> wrote then. In the years since, he's written a third collection, <i>The Night in Question,</i> as well as a pair of genre-defining memoirs <i>(This Boy's Life</i> and <i>In Pharaoh's Army) ,</i> the novella <i>The Barracks Thief,</i> and, most recently, a novel, <i>Old School.</i><br><br>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 <i>Los Angeles Times,</i> &quot;a writer of the highest order: part storyteller, part philosopher, someone deeply engaged in asking hard questions that take a lifetime to resolve.&quot;