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.

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.

The protagonist of Tobias Wolff’s shrewdly—and at times devastatingly—observed first novel is a boy at an elite prep school in 1960. He is an outsider who has learned to mimic the negligent manner of his more privileged classmates. Like many of them, he wants more than anything on earth to become a writer. But to do that he must first learn to tell the truth about himself. The agency of revelation is the school literary contest, whose winner will be awarded an audience with the most legendary writer of his time. As the fever of competition infects the boy and his classmates, fraying alliances, exposing weaknesses, Old School explores the ensuing deceptions and betrayals with an unblinking eye and a bottomless store of empathy. The result is further evidence that Wolff is an authentic American master.

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."

From one of our finest writers, a brilliant and unflinching account of his tour in Vietnam. As a young officer he ricochets between boredom and terror and grief for lost friends. Then and in years to come, he reckons the cost of staying alive in both body and spirit. 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.

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."

Damien Wilkins has been called the most talented short story writer of his generation. His first book of poetry broadens that reputation, displaying in a fresh setting his exuberant skill with language. These are poems which engage the fullest range of sympathies, inhabiting that world of brothers and cousins, of puddings and TABs and cicadas, of bad teeth and bad ideas, ill-temper and reverie—the romance of thought as well as of things, of what is idle and what is otherwise.

An emotionally charged comedy of manners,– supremely elegant and funny but also with the power to shake the reader's feelings.

Luke is a young diplomat on his first overseas posting. He's in New York, preparing for the 50th anniversary of the United Nations. His photo has appeared in The New York Times. He has a knack for success. Then he witnesses a crime, the fallout from which threatens everything. His fainting spells return and he finds himself back in New Zealand, living on his sister's farm, caught up in another difficulty altogether, and involved in the life of a community whose personalities and rules of conduct he finds as bewitching and dizzying as anything experienced at the frontline of international diplomacy. By the end of his time there, which takes the reader only halfway through this novel, Luke has been asked the most testing questions about himself. In the second part of the book, these questions return with a new and surprising urgency. The Fainter is a superb novel, beautifully written, bracingly funny, rich with cutting insight and cool compassion.

A deeply moving and funny portrayal of a mother and son, this humorous novel about coping with an unusual situation tells the story of a speech therapist whose mother awakes one day to find herself suddenly—for no apparent reason—speaking with a heavy French accent.

Evelyn has left her home and her husband. She has taken her thirteen-year-old daughter two thousand miles across the USA to her childhood home. The drizzly Pacific Northwest suits Evelyn's mood perfectly. She takes small doses of liquor from a secret supply and spends her time smoking under wet trees in the company of a hen. But her home town has more on its mind than Evelyn's troubles. The volcano that sits on the horizon has suddenly become active. Scientists, tourists, thrill-seekers flood the district. Evelyn tries to ignore it. She cannot, however ignore the phone calls she starts receiving following a car accident. Who is the caller? What does he want?