The influences on his work-his friend Raymond Carver and earlier masters such as Guy de Maupassant, Anton Chekhov, Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, and Flannery O’Connor-indicate the company Wolff intends to keep. For the reader, the result is full of surprises, insights, humor, and other line-by-line rewards, particularly in character portrayal and style. He has said, in interviews, that he needs time to get to know his characters but that the finished story no longer holds any surprises for him. Working slowly, sometimes taking months and countless drafts, he polishes each story into an entertaining, gemlike work that reads with deceptive ease. Since 1980 he has taught literature and writing at Syracuse University.Tobias Wolff (born June 19, 1945) is an outstanding contemporary craftsman of the American short story.
He thereafter took degrees at Oxford and Stanford. He briefly attended prep school in Pennsylvania, then joined the U.S. Born in Alabama, he was raised in Salt Lake City and in the mountains above Seattle. Seamless, ironic, dizzying in their emotional aptness, these fifteen stories deliver small, exquisite shocks that leave us feeling invigorated and intensely alive.Ībout the Author Tobias Wolff has written about his life in the acclaimed This Boy's Life and in In Pharoah's Army. An impecunious mother and son go window-shopping for a domesticity that is forever beyond their grasp. A soldier in Vietnam goads his lieutenant into sending him on increasingly dangerous missions. A young reporter writes an obituary only to be fired when its subject walks into his office, very much alive. And everywhere in The Night in Question, we are reminded that truth is deceptive, volatile, and often the last thing we want to know. The other half is that Wolff makes the reversal seem inevitable: the dog has attacked his protagonist's young daughter. The fact that Wolff is reversing familiar expectations is only half the point. These stories seize your imagination".-"The New York Times".īook Synopsis 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. About the Book In this fine book of stories, the PEN/Faulkner Award-winning author of "This Boy's Life" arrives at truths-about love, death, sex, and solitude-that are as invigorating as they are unsettling.
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