Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘Tobias Wolff’

Interviews |

Influences: An Interview with Tobias Wolff

From the Archives: Travis Holland talks with fiction master Tobias Wolff about the pleasures and anxieties of influence, the changing societal role of writer-celebrities, and the reasons Wolff has “always been attracted to the incisiveness, velocity, exactitude, precision of the short story.”


Shop Talk |

Short Story Month rec: "Bullet in the Brain"

Recently, I was at Grub Street’s Muse and the Marketplace writers’ conference here in Boston, and in one session we looked at Tobias Wolff‘s “Bullet in the Brain.” I was surprised at (1) how many people had not read the story–of a group of 30 people, I was one of maybe 5 who had, and (2) how amazing this story really is. So compressed and so focused: crystalline. Perfect for teaching yourself, or others: you can take it apart, sentence by sentence, and figure out why each word is there and exactly how the story is working. And yet, even […]