Tobias Wolff

1935, Bacon County, Georgia. The bite of the Great Depression was beginning to be felt in the rest of America, but its teeth had been in Bacon County for years. Here one of America's most original storytellers, Harry Crews, was born in a sharecropper's cabin at the end of a dirt road. A Childhood is his memoir of that time - his first years of life - and that place: the poor soil and the sickness, the blood feuds and the faith healers, the ghosts and the shopping catalogues. A profound vision of the rural South that resounds with the violence of poverty and the tenderness of kinship, A Childhood is a true American classic.

The 30th anniversary edition of Tobias Wolff's "extraordinary memoir" (SF Chronicle), now with a new introduction by the author

From Baobab Press, in coordination with the University of Nevada, Reno’s Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program, comes This Side of the Divide: Stories, the first anthology in a literary series attempting to capture the newness, vastness, territoriality and sense of transience alive in the American West. Set west of the Continental Divide, these narratives skillfully demonstrate the beauty, austerity, and danger of the untouched wilderness, delight in the mutual ease and asphyxiation of the hyper-urban and chart the interstitial spaces of the developing and the abandoned. Inhabiting the West’s richly varied landscapes, the characters in these stories provide a glimpse of the social and cultural diversity on display in these regions. Among these 15 stories, gathered from rising literary voices, a single mother struggles to maintain her individuality while raising an autistic son; a cathartic hike brings an unsuspecting widow face-to-face with her own mortality; a man injured in a train wreck questions his existence as he blindly wanders the desert; an aging cowboy rides the highways astride his magnificent horse, a final remnant of a fleeting era; Sasquatch looks for love in all the wrong places; and a divorcee tries to reconcile her present with her past, her heart with her head. Positioning the voices of emerging authors alongside acclaimed writers such as Tobias Wolff, Brian Evenson and Nona Caspers, these collected stories, at turns hilarious, frightening, and devastating, showcase the variety of identity, amalgam of voice and depth of character that make the American West such a truly brilliant, literary mosaic. Contributors include Tobias Wolff, Maile Meloy, Brian Evenson, Melinda Moustakis, Nona Caspers, Douglas W. Milliken, David Gillette, Miranda Schmidt, Michelle Willms, Andrea Lani, Leah Griesmann, Vanessa Hua, Cathy Warner, Mark Maynard, Aharon Levy, Sian Griffiths, L. L. Madrid, Kirk Wilson, Ashley Davidson, Carl Beideman, E. G. Willy, Shelley Blanton-Stroud, and Linda Lenhoff.

A collection of twelve short stories that showcases Tobias Wolff's extraordinary talent, available in a deluxe paperback edition--part of Ecco's The Art of the Story Series. 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.

Our Story Begins combines twenty-one of Tobias Wolff's classic stories with ten potent new works, spanning three decades and confirming Wolff's status as a master of the genre. These stories of war, morality, frustration, loneliness and love trace a path through the everyday and the extraordinary, shedding a poignant yet hopeful light on American life and the intricate truths of human nature.

"One of our most exquisite storytellers" (Esquire) 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. 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," as The New York Times Book Review wrote then. 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."

Seminararbeit aus dem Jahr 2005 im Fachbereich Politik - Pol. Systeme - Historisches, einseitig bedruckt, Note: 2,0, Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen (Institut für Politische Wissenschaft), Veranstaltung: Grundkurs-Tutorium, 26 Eintragungen im Literaturverzeichnis, Sprache: Deutsch, Abstract: Mit der sowjetischen Note vom 27. November 1958 an die drei Westmächte und die Bundesrepublik Deutschland (BRD), das sogenannte "Berlin Ultimatum" löste Chruschtschow, Erster Sekretär des Zentralkomitees (ZK) der Kommunistischen Partei der Sowjetunion (KpdSU) und Vorsitzender des Ministerrates der UdSSR, am 10. November 1958 die zweite Berlinkrise aus. Die Note beinhaltete, dass die westliche Besatzung Berlins unrechtmäßig sei, da ganz Berlin auf dem Territorium der DDR liegt. West-Berlin soll zu einer selbstständigen politischen Einheit und Freien Stadt umgewandelt werden. Ist dies durchgeführt, dann ist die DDR auf ihrem Territorium, inklusive aller Verbindungswege nach West-Berlin, souverän. Danach werde es keine Vier-Mächte-Kontakte mehr geben. Mit die-ser Note unterstütze Chruschtschow Walter Ulbricht, erster Sekretär des ZK in der DDR, mit dessen Rede am 27. Oktober 1958, in der er sagte: "Ganz Berlin liegt auf dem Territorium der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik. Ganz Berlin gehört zum Hoheitsbereich der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik." Nun gilt es zu prüfen, ob der Mauerbau ein Resultat eines schwelenden, langanhaltenden Konfliktes zwischen den beiden Supermächten USA und UdSSR war oder ob es sich um eine Kurzschlussreaktion seitens der DDR-Regierung mit Duldung der Sowjetunion handelt. Es muss auch geklärt werden, ob die westdeutsche Regierung um Adenauer zu wenig gegen die Teilung Berlins tat oder ob sie wirklich ohnmächtig war. Die These der Arbeit ist, dass die DDR-Regierung den Mauerbau als letzte Chance sah, um deren Untergang zu verhindern auf-grund der starken Republikflucht. Seit der Gründung beider Staaten im Jahre 1949 bis zum Mauerbau im Jahre 1961 verließen nach offiziellen Zahlen etwa 2,7 Millionen Menschen die DDR. Unter ihnen waren sehr viele Akademiker und Facharbeiter ohne deren Wissen und Arbeitskraft die DDR auskommen musste.

At one prestigious American public school, the boys like to emphasise their democratic ideals - the only acknowledged snobbery is literary snobbery. Once a term, a big name from the literary world visits and a contest takes place. The boys have to submit a piece of writing and the winner receives a private audience with the visitor. But then it is announced that Hemingway, the boys' hero, is coming to the school. The competition intensifies, and the morals the school and the boys pride themselves on - honour, loyalty and friendship - are crumbling under the strain. Only time will tell who will win and what it will cost them.

During his senior year at an elite New England prep school, a young man who had struggled to find it with his contemporaries finds his life unraveling thanks to the school's obsession with literary figures and their work during a visit from an author for whose blessing a young writer would do almost anything. By the author of This Boy's Life. A first novel. Reprint. 75,000 first printing.

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 author of "The Barracks Thief" and "Hunters in the Snow" 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.

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

Written by the author of "The Barracks Thief", "This Boy's Life" and "Hunters in the Snow", this collection of stories looks at how people rewrite their own histories, and examines how revenge, as another urge to put things right, can take curious forms.

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 volume brings together all the stories from Tobias Wolff's collections "Hunters in the Snow" (1982) and "Back in the World" (1985) with his intense short novel "The Barrack's Thief" - winner of the 1984 PEN/Faulkner Award. These are works which impart powerful realisations of the discrepancy between the everyday world and our secret dreams and aspirations, hallmarked with a craftsmanship that has earned the author three O. Henry Prizes.

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.