Ugly rumours: A novel

WOLFF, Tobias

Literature & Fiction

Allen& Unwin

In this unforgettable memoir of boyhood in the 1950s, we meet the young Toby Wolff, by turns tough and vulnerable, crafty and bumbling, and ultimately winning. Separated by divorce from his father and brother, Toby and his mother are constantly on the move. Between themselves they develop an almost telepathic trust that sees them through their wanderings from Florida to a small town in Washington State. Fighting for identity and self-respect against the unrelenting hostility of a new stepfather, Toby's growing up is at once poignant and comical. His various schemes--running away to Alaska, forging cheeks, and stealing cars--lead eventually to an act of outrageous self-invention that releases him into a new world of possibility.

This Boy's Life: A Memoir

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Perennial

A collection of twelve short stories that showcases Tobias Wolff’s extraordinary talent, available in a deluxe paperback edition—part of Ecco’s The Art of the Story Series.
In The Garden of the North American Martyrs, Tobias Wolff’s first collection of short fiction, hailed the arrival of a major talent and the beginning of an acclaimed, bestselling career. In each of these sharply crafted stories, his characters, drawn from everyday life, stumble over each other in their baffled yet resolute search for the “right path.” Among the characters in these twelve stories 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 endures the offensive conviviality of the ship’s social director.

In the Garden of the North American Martyrs Deluxe Edition: Stories (Art of the Story)

United States

Ecco

Hunters in the Snow is a classic short story by Tobias Wolff centered around the suburbs of Spokane and featured in In the Garden of the North American Martyrs. The story deals with three characters hunting together in the woods; Kenny, who is hard and brutal; Tub, who is fat, a target of ridicule, and lags behind the rest of the party; and Frank, who is the most "frank" of the group. Each character has a distinct personality which changes as the story progresses. The story reaches its climax when Tub shoots Kenny in what appears to be an accident. Tub and Frank seem to be taking Kenny to a hospital, but wind up stopping in a diner and a roadhouse in a strange chain of events. The story ends with them driving in a direction that is opposite to the one of the hospital. This story is believed to be based upon the painting Hunters in the Snow by Pieter Bruegel, a painter involved in the realism movement.

Hunters in the Snow: A Collection of Short Stories

Contemporary

Vintage/Ebury (A Division of Random House Group)

Back in the World

British & Irish

JONATHAN CAPE.

This Boy's Life (Picador Books)

Harper & Row/Perennial

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.

Old School

Literary

KNOPF

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 Schoolexplores 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.

Dramas & Plays

Vintage

This new collection of ten short stories is a record of the lives and secrets of diverse men and women and their sometimes comical, sometimes violent progress

Back in the World: Stories

Houghton, mifflin, harcourt

The annual tribute to the short fiction form is especially strong for 1994 with a new generation of voices, including Christopher Tilghman, Thom Jones, and Carol Anshaw, with impressive debuts by Lan Samantha Chang and Carolyn Ferrell. Simultaneous.

Best American Short Stories 1994

Kenison, Katrina

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