Some of the best short stories you'll ever read

books:

	• The Night in Question: Stories Tobias Wolff Random House Audio, 1996 average customer review:based on 21 reviews
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highly recommended

Masterful, Moving, Magical

Before I picked up this book I was only vaguely aware of Tobias Wolff, never having, as far as I can recall, read anything of his. I did remember that he had written a memoir of his peripatetic childhood that was praised probably fifteen years ago. I was unprepared for the power and grace of this collection of short stories published in 1996. A little research on the Internet tells me that Wolff is primarily a short story writer -- he has certainly found his niche in that, although I gather he has recently written a novel -- and is a professor at Stanford. But, most of all, he is a born story-teller. This is not to say that one is not also aware of the lapidary quality of his writing. My point is that even absent his writing skill he would still be someone you'd want to engage in conversation, or rather someone you'd like to sit and listen to as he spins yarns about the mundane. The mundane is his subject, but like all good writers, he puts it in such a perspective as to make it new and insightful.

Others before me, here at Amazon, have written about certain of the short stories here. The stories' subject matter is, generally, that of youth and young adulthood, and most importantly, about observation. His protagonists seem to have a preternatural writer's eye, which is part of what I look for in fiction. That's one of the great things about a great writer -- that ability to see things in ways most of us don't.

My favorite story? Probably 'Firelight,' about a boy and his hapless but courageous mother who go to look at apartments. Simple plot, but with deep implications about belonging, what home and family is, and about hope. The coda of this story, with the little boy all grown up and with a family of his own, tells us, as so often in Wolff's stories, how childhood experience colors our adult lives. Beautiful. I suppose now I'll have to go and read everything Wolff has written. Nice to contemplate.

Scott Morrison

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great collection of amazing works

Wolff is an amazing writer. He says more in these short stories than other writers say in entire books. I heard Bullet in the Brain on This American Life and I had to buy the book. I am so glad that I did. Kids will be studying these someday in school.

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Some of the best short stories you'll ever read

After Raymond Carver and Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff is usually tagged as the minor partner in the pioneers of "dirty realism", a fairly meaningless term which was used to denote a new orthodoxy of somber and minimalist fiction about blue-collar American life. Having read all three, I think Wolff is actually the better writer. His stories are richer and more complex than Carver's in terms of their characters and themes, and they're more accessible than Ford's. Those collected here are fine examples. The plots are often simple; the incidents and settings are everyday, you might even say mundane. Yet in even the smallest moments from the most ordinary lives, Wolff skillfully illuminates the larger forces that animate them: love, desire, revenge, regret, vanity, hope and gratitude. Time and again, in the space of a paragraph or even a single phrase, the story turns, escalates, opens up, reveals itself as concerned with something far more substantial than you might have sensed. You can fall through a moment of banality and find yourself in a story with the density of a planet. The economy with which Wolff manages this is sometimes breathtaking, as in "Lady's Dream" and "Bullet in the Brain" which lay bare entire lives in the space of a few pages. Every story here is excellent, but three stood out for me: "The Life of the Body", in which a civilized school teacher is unable to resist the siren songs of sex and violence; "The Other Miller", which explores the relationship between a young soldier and his estranged mother; and "The Chain", a three-act suburban tragedy with the corny arc of a Hollywood screenplay, but which still manages to be moving because at its heart there's truth. That seems to be the key to Wolff's work. It's the one thing you just keep noticing: there isn't a single climactic moment that doesn't ring true.

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One of the Best Short Story Writers Ever.

I liked this collection but, don't kill me, I thought In The Garden of the North American Martyrs was better. Maybe it's my imagination or something about the timing of my reading each, but with The Night in Question I thought that at times Wolff was packing too much into his sentences, too much insight. It was all trenchant observation and inspiration, but those pockets of narrative threw the rest of the story off kilter for me and detracted from what I liked so much about In the Garden: that the stories are so simple and -- within that -- so elegantly complex. This could be my imagination; I'm not sure.

I give this book 4 out of 5 stars. But I second everybody who said Wolff takes ordinary occurrences and portrays them beautifully and, as the pieces come together, with so much significance. Thanks also to the person who mentioned Carver. I agree, it would have been nice to see his writing mature.

If you haven't read any of Wolff's books or are thinking of getting this book, definitely do. Buy In the Garden too.

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Wolff Has Yet To Disappoint

Tobias Wolff has written yet another fantastic collection of short stories with The Night in Question. Wolff has yet to disappointment me with any of his writings thus far, and since I believe I've read all of his works but for one or two, it does not seem as though that may be a possibility. The Night in Question is a collection dealing with all too human aspects in a series of stories that are unlikely, but certainly not beyond the realm of possibility. The peculiarity is not the focus in Wolff's stories; rather, it's the human reaction to the peculiarities that make his writing rich and enlightening.

Once again, I recommend virtually any of Wolff's work with supreme confidence, and The Night in Question is no exception. My particular favorites in this work were "Flyboys," "The Life of the Body," and one that was very unusual for Wolff, "Bullet in the Brain."

~Scott William Foley, author of The Imagination's Provocation: Volume I: A Collection of Short Stories

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

With his first collection in over ten years, one of American's foremost short story writers again demonstrates what Tim O'Brien has called "the ancient art of a master storyteller." Whether in childhood or Vietnam, in memory or the eternal present, the people in these stories are revealed in the extenuating, sometimes extreme circumstances of everyday life. Simultaneous hardcover release from Knopf. 2 cassettes.

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