Tobias Wolff’s latest collection of stories, Our Story Begins, came out a couple of years ago, but I want to post a good piece about Wolff from Slate that I stumbled upon this week. I am quite a fan of Wolff’s, whose memoir This Boy’s Life is one of my top ten books of all time, and it always helps an author’s case when they are genuinely charming and friendly in person too – I chatted with him in college at a dinner hosted by my writing professor. So, consider this a very high recommendation if you have yet to discover this author:
The Liberation of Lying: What Tobias Wolff gets and the frauds don’t.
By Judith Shulevitz
One of the best stories in Our Story Begins, a collection of new and selected older stories by Tobias Wolff, is called “The Liar.” It’s about a teenage boy who regales strangers with dark fictions about his family—appalling accounts of misfortune and disease. These drive his mother crazy; a concrete, pious person, she can’t stand dishonesty, and she sends him to the family doctor. The charm of the story lies in the likability of its characters. The mother is a good woman and a fine parent; the doctor is an understanding sort who doesn’t make too much of the boy’s misdeeds; the boy is mature enough to appreciate his mother’s concerns and his doctor’s efforts on his behalf. But he can’t stop lying. Eventually, we learn that he started the day his father died, after a struggle with cancer, in his favorite chair. The boy, finding the corpse, got a friend to help him drag it upstairs to bed. His mother was relieved—’”Thank God,” she said, “at least he died in bed”‘—until she discovered what her son had not told her. The end of the story finds the boy on a bus that has broken down in a storm, recounting a magnificent whopper. He was born in Tibet; he was raised by missionaries; he is fluent in Tibetan. Soon he starts singing his fellow passengers to sleep in made-up Tibetan, “surely,” he says, “an ancient and holy tongue.”…
For the complete article, please click here to go to Slate.com.
Emerging Authors On Camera
Hearing a novelist talk about their first book is a great way to get excited about reading it. Huff Post blogger and author Anis Shivani wants readers to “experience the book up-close, and get a personal, informal, intimate sense of the book, the writer, their work habits, and the marketplace and readership they’re hoping to address”…
This is certainly a sentiment we at Peroozal can get behind!
Virtual Book Tour: 3 Emerging Fiction Writers Introduce Their Work (Huff Post)
by Anis Shivani, anisshivani.com
As any emerging writer knows, while the road to publication is tough and the obstacles many, there is no emotion to compare with holding your book in your hand for the first time–after the galleys have been gone over with a fine-tooth comb, the tiniest details of the cover settled on, the many who helped in the making of the book thanked and acknowledged, and the anxious but sweet wait for the reception of the book has begun.
In what we hope will be a continuing series spotlighting promising fiction writers and poets ahead of the publication of their books, we asked three young fiction writers to record a short introduction to their book, followed by a brief reading–so you can be the first to experience the book up-close, and get a personal, informal, intimate sense of the book, the writer, their work habits, and the marketplace and readership they’re hoping to address:
Rebecca Rasmussen tells us about her debut novel, The Bird Sisters (Crown, April 12)…
Valerie Laken tells us about her first story collection, Separate Kingdoms (Harper Perennial, March 29)…
Alan Heathcock tells us about his debut story collection, Volt: Stories (Graywolf, March 1)…
Click here for the videos.