OUR STORY BEGINS

Tobias Wolff''s first two books, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs and Back in the World, were a powerful demonstration of how the short story can ''provoke our amazed appreciation'' (New York Times Book Review). In the years since he''s written a third collection, The Night in Question, as well as a pair of genre-defining memoirs (This Boy''s Life and In Pharaoh''s Army), the novella The Barracks Thief, and, most recently, a novel, Old School. Now he returns with fresh revelations - about biding one''s time, or experiencing first love, or burying one''s mother - that come to a variety of characters in circumstances at once everyday and extraordinary: a retired Marine enrolled in college while her son trains for Iraq, a lawyer taking a difficult deposition, an American in Rome indulging the gypsy who''s picked his pocket. In these stories, as with his earlier, much-anthologized work, he once again proves himself, according to the Los Angeles Times, ''a writer of the highest order: part storyteller, part philosopher, someone deeply engaged in asking hard questions that take a lifetime to resolve.''