1985
First Published
4.07
Average Rating
223
Number of Pages
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 "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." "Terrific...The magic of his fiction cannot be explained. It is the ancient art of the master storyteller."—Tim O'Brien
Avg Rating
4.07
Number of Ratings
1,231
5 STARS
33%
4 STARS
45%
3 STARS
18%
2 STARS
3%
1 STARS
1%
goodreads
Author
Tobias Wolff
Author · 24 books
Tobias Jonathan Ansell Wolff is a writer of fiction and nonfiction. He is best known for his short stories and his memoirs, although he has written two novels. Wolff is the Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University, where he has taught classes in English and creative writing since 1997. He also served as the director of the Creative Writing Program at Stanford from 2000 to 2002.
