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Product Description
Book Description
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."
About the Author
Tobias Wolff lives in Northern California and teaches at Stanford University. Author of the recent novel Old School, he has received the Rea Award for excellence in the short story, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the PEN/Faulkner Award. His collection of short stories, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, is also available from Ecco.
I wake up afraid. Read the first page
Concordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Characterizations that resonate,
By
This review is from: In The Garden Of The North American Martyrs (Paperback)
The characters in Tobias Wolff's short stories are typically ordinary people in relatively ordinary circumstances yet he creates through them such vivd glimpses of humanity that we recognize our friends ,relatives,neighbors and ourselves in them.Powerful writing that is subtle and yet somehow unforgettable. All of his short fiction collections are equally enjoyable and I would have a hard time recommending one as opposed to any other. This particular book contains several stories that will pull you in and cause you to want to explore more. This is a book that can be opened at random to any of the selections and read with great enjoyment.
4.0 out of 5 stars
I sang to them in what was surely an ancient and holy tongue,
By wte-nyc (New York, NY) - See all my reviews
This review is from: In The Garden Of The North American Martyrs (Paperback)
In "Liar," the last story in this collection, the main character, a boy, whose persistent, gruesome lies send his mother into exasperation, confesses his own bewilderment about why he makes up these stories. He does not know, but one suspects that at least part of the reason is because these stories are jarring enough in their tragedy and beauty to elicit the very best from the people he tells it to: compassion, pity, laughter, awe, appreciation. One also suspects that this motivation isn't far from one of Wolff's own motivations for writing these often compassionate, humorous and awe-inspiring stories.On the other hand, it doesn't feel quite right to call Wolff a "liar" because it often feels like he's being brutally frank with us. Far from just giving us what we want, Wolff's stories feel like challenges. The stories often involve characters who seem either not to know what motivate them or live under some false illusion of what motivates them, resulting in some uncharacteristic action. That is not, of course, to say that Wolff's stories fail to adequately flesh out these characters, but rather that they suggest we all have identities less coherent than we want to believe and we are all often reflections of our environments (even if we cannot quite say how those environments affect us) and some burning insatiable longing (which we are helpless to say how to satisfy) -- and that's the challenge. These stories often take place in strange, unfamiliar places where the characters are unsure of how to act because they are not those familar places where they feel most like themselves... a snowy field where three men go hunting, an isolated cabin the woods where the character recently moves, an academic conference where a professor meets a woman, a boarding school in New England, a road where two people talk to one another in a car. These places seem to encapsulate that certain feeling running throughout Wolff's stories -- a nostalgia or longing or compassion for a place or time, even though we are aware that it has no less faults or confusions or delusions than we have now.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Voice in the Garden,
By Nathaniel (Bellingham, Washington) - See all my reviews
This review is from: In The Garden Of The North American Martyrs (Paperback)
I have read Tobias Wolff for about 5 years now so I was very exited to read this collection of short stories, and needless to say I was not disappointed. The first story I ever read from Wolff was "Bullet in the Brain", and these stories followed in the same amazing tradition. Wolff is able to set the reader down in the middle of a scenario or time like no other author. This voice that he uses is so unique in each story and that you have a real sense of who you are dealing with in each story, and on a smaller level, each character. Wolff is able to create interest in situations and actions that border on plain on all other accounts. He creates characters that we see next to us on the bus everyday buy showing the reader who they are in the actions that carry out, and the how they deal with the certain situations they find themselves in. A hunting trip with friends becomes a look into the deepest crevasse of friendship; a fender bender turns into a trial in patience and trusting with people in everyday settings. Wolff is a master at writing these stories in a voice that speaks to every person, and yet is so unique that we must read on. This was a wonderful collection of stories and is highly recommended for any reader of fiction.
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