books in order

Tobias Wolff Books In Order

Novels

  1. Ugly Rumours (1975)
  2. Old School (2003)

Collections

  1. In the Garden of the North American Martyrs (1981)
  2. Hunters in the Snow (1982)
  3. The Barracks Thief (1984)
  4. Back in the World (1985)
  5. Collected Stories (1988)
  6. The Night in Question (1996)
  7. Ten (1996)
  8. Our Story Begins (2008)

Chapbooks

  1. Two Boys and a Girl (1996)

Anthologies edited

  1. Matters of Life and Death (1983)
  2. Ploughshares Fall 1992 (1992)
  3. The Picador Book of Contemporary American Fiction (1993)
  4. Writers Harvest 3: A Collection of New Fiction (2000)
  5. Best New American Voices 2000 (2000)

Non fiction

  1. This Boy’s Life (1989)
  2. In Pharaoh’s Army (1994)
  3. A Federal Offense (2017)

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Tobias Wolff Books Overview

Old School

The author of the genre defining memoir This Boy’s Life, the PEN/Faulkner Award winning novella The Barracks Thief, and short stories acclaimed as modern classics, Tobias Wolff now gives us his first novel. Determined to fit in at his New England prep school, the narrator has learned to mimic the bearing and manners of his adoptive tribe while concealing as much as possible about himself. His final year, however, unravels everything he s achieved, and steers his destiny in directions no one could have predicted. The school s mystique is rooted in Literature, and for many boys this becomes an obsession, editing the review and competing for the attention of visiting writers whose fame helps to perpetuate the tradition. Robert Frost, soon to appear at JFK s inauguration, is far less controversial than the next visitor, Ayn Rand. But the final guest is one whose blessing a young writer would do almost anything to gain. No one writes more astutely than Wolff about the process by which character is formed, and here he illuminates the irresistible power, even the violence, of the self creative urge. Resonant in ways at once contemporary and timeless, Old School is a masterful achievement by one of the finest writers of our time.

In the Garden of the North American Martyrs

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.’

The Barracks Thief

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.

Back in the World

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

Collected Stories

This collection brings together stories from ‘Hunters In the Snow’ and ‘Back In the World’, and features the PEN/Faulkner Award winning short story, ‘The Barrack Thief’. Tobias Wolff is the author of ‘In Pharoah’s Army’ and ‘This Boy’s Life’.

The Night in Question

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.

Our Story Begins

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.

Ploughshares Fall 1992

Short Stories. Contributors include: Susan Bergman, Mary Bush, Dan Chaon, George Cruys, Andre Dubus, Stuart Dybek, Paul Griner, Susan Hubbard, Leon Kortenkamp, Martin McKinsey, Robert Olmstead, Susan Power, Mona Simpson, Sharon Solwitz, Jessica Treadway, Vassilis Tsiamboussis, Christopher Zenowich

Best New American Voices 2000

Culled from over one hundred prestigious writing programs around the United States and Canada, Best New American Voices 2000 offers a remarkable panoply of writing talent that showcases the literary stars of tomorrow. Included here are twenty of the finest stories to come out of such programs as Breadloaf, the Sewanee Conference, the Banff Centre for the Arts, the University of Iowa, and the PEN/Prison Writing Committee, as nominated by the directors of those programs. Represented are all facets of North American life, a diverse collection of visions and voices that will satisfy the most exacting of short story readers. This dynamic collection is must reading for all fans of innovative, cutting edge new writing.

This Boy’s Life

First published in 1989, this memoir has become a classic in the genre. With this book, Wolff essentially launched the memoir craze that has been going strong ever since. It was made into a movie in 1993. Fiction writer Tobias Wolff electrified critics with his scarifying 1989 memoir, which many deemed as notable for its artful structure and finely wrought prose as for the events it describes. The story is pretty grim: Teenaged Wolff moves with his divorced mother from Florida to Utah to Washington State to escape her violent boyfriend. When she remarries, Wolff finds himself in a bitter battle of wills with his abusive stepfather, a contest in which the two prove to be more evenly matched than might have been supposed. Deception, disguise, and illusion are the weapons the young man learns to employ as he grows up not bad training for a writer to be. Somber though this tale of family strife is, it is also darkly funny and so artistically satisfying that listeners come away exhilarated.

In Pharaoh’s Army

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.

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