TOBIAS WOLFF
Friday, April 18 at 7:30 p.m.

A writer whose coming of age up in the upper Skagit Valley was chronicled in the landmark memoir, This Boy's Life, Tobias Wolff has long been one of the foremost short-story writers at work today. He makes this welcome Elliott Bay return to read from Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories (Knopf). "Wolff's first story collection, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs (1981), was a major salvo in the short story renaissance that included Raymond Carver. The 10, spare elegant new stories here, collected with 21 stories from Wolff's three previous collections, are as good as anything Wolff has done. In most, there is a moment of realization, less a startling epiphany than a distant, gradual ache of understanding, that changes how a character looks at the world ... In all the stories, Wolff expertly uses irony and empathy to explore facets of contemporary life." - Publishers Weekly.

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