Tobias WOLFF ... Our Story Begins (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008)

“… this is a volume that belongs on everybody’s shelf along with Hemingway’s In Our Time, Salinger’s Nine Stories and the collected works of Flannery O’Connor, Raymond Carver, Gabriel García Márquez, William Trevor and Alice Munro.”
Marianne Wiggins, in the Los Angeles Times

“Wolff’s alchemy in these stories is oddly and deeply transformative. They inevitably rise above their ostensible subject into some universal terrain. How Wolff achieves this effect is something of a miracle. He manages without a particularly striking prose style. What he has in spades, though, is intelligence, compassion and a radical openness to life’s unfathomable surprises.”
Dan Cryer, in the San Francisco Chronicle

Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008)
A collection of 31 stories from one of the leading practitioners of the short-story form. Wolff is the author of three story collections, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs (1981), Back in the World (1985) and The Night In Question (1996). His new collection gathers 21 of his most popular stories from his previous collections and 10 new ones, all arranged chronologically.