?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.?
