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Volume 20: Tobias Wolff, Our Story Begins |
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PERFORMANCE AND SPOKEN WORD -
Channel 192
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First broadcast April 21, 2008
Tobias Wolff's latest work, which includes both new and selected stories, reminds us once again that we are in the hands of an artist. Influenced by Chekhov but thoroughly American, Wolff presents ordinary people in extraordinary situations. As Wyatt Mason wrote in the London Review of Books, "Typically, his protagonists face an acute moral dilemma, unable to reconcile what they know to be true with what they feel to be true. Duplicity is their great failing, and Wolff's main theme." And in Wolff's own words: "I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is, and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels. They have to be; there just can't be any kind of relaxation of the narrative. Everything has to be pulling weight in a short story for it to be really of the first order. And you can't do that with a novel."
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Last Updated ( Sunday, 20 April 2008 )
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