Back in the World
Stories
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- ¥1,400
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- ¥1,400
Publisher Description
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."
"Terrific...The magic of his fiction cannot be explained. It is the ancient art of the master storyteller."--Tim O'Brien
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wolff (PEN/Faulkner winner for The Barracks Thief offers tales in the classic mode, maintaining unity of time, place and action. His characters and their dilemmas become recognizable in a few pages. "The voice is crisp, the words are simple, the talk is laconic and everyday, but the questions these 10 stories pose are terrifying ones about good and evil,'' PW found.
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