Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories by Tobias Wolff; 2008. Hardcover.

Wolff's first collection in over a decade: ten potent new stories that, along with twenty-one classics, which display his mastery over a quarter century. In his new stories there are 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 proves himself someone deeply engaged in asking hard questions.