Showing results by author "Tobias Wolff" in All Categories

A collection of poignant, romantic and funny tales performed by Academy Award -winning actor William Hurt. This collection includes a bonus track of an exclusive interview with William Hurt. Hurt's readings are thoughtful, tender, romantic, and resonant. A treasure.

Meticulous, funny, eccentric - Mary has always been mindful of the complex role she plays as a professor of history. Her lectures are carefully written out beforehand; her departmental loyalties ambiguous. She is so careful, in fact, that she began to see herself as flat, dull, and lifeless. The closing of Brandon College, the institution she'd spent more than fifteen years at, changes everything. Forced to find another position, Mary finds herself at an experimental college in rainy Oregon.

Harry Crews grew up as the son of a sharecropper in Georgia at a time when “the rest of the country was just beginning to feel the real hurt of the Great Depression but it had been living in Bacon County for years.” Yet what he conveys in this moving, brutal autobiography of his first six years of life is an elegiac sense of community and roots from a rural South that had rarely been represented in this way.

Anders is an angry, cynical man. A book critic known for his scathing reviews, he finds any excuse to dismiss, belittle, or insult. This afternoon is no more agitating than the next. Angers finds himself in a long line at the bank, waiting to reach a teller. Even after two men - wearing masks and carrying guns - take control of the building, Anders is unfazed. It's this behavior that lands him with a pistol against his stomach and a man screamingin his face. And when the bank robber, indignant over Anders' behavior, shoots the book critic in the head, his mind floats through the memories of his life, settling on one particular event....

Two drugged-out couples contemplate life and morality in "Leviathan", a classic short story by the masterful Tobias Wolff. For Helen's 30th birthday party, her husband decides tothrow her a small party. Armed with booze and three grams of cocaine, the four partyers - Helen, her husband, and another couple - spend the night and the next morning in a drug-induced stupor. As their talk turns to past misdeeds and shameful acts, the couples begin to wonder if it's not the bad decisions in life that bring happiness and meaning.

Theresa left the Marines after twenty-two years to start a new life. Her husband had moved on to a second wife, and her son had recently enlisted. Now Theresa is going to school, getting a degree in hotel management. But it is her art history class she finds most interesting, and a chance encounter with her professor leaves her with new fears for her life, for the future - and for her son.

James is a liar. He enjoys inventing fantastic stories about his family, particularly his mother. Margaret is orderly, stubborn, and judgmental - a woman who throws rocks at hungry bears and never misses four o'clock Mass. She loves her children but has always struggled with James. Like his deceased father, he's fascinated by the darker aspects of life - car crashes, illness, and crime. Dr. Murphy, the family physician who dabbles in psychiatry, believes that James' lying is harmless. His mother, however, thinks otherwise.

Dr. Booth drives his son, Owen, to Fort Steele Academy, where he hopes his son will thrive in a structured, disciplined environment that mirrors Booth's own upbringing. But after he drops Owen off at his new school, he's filled with a deep sense of doubt - about his decision to send his son away, about his childhood - and finds himself lost in more ways than one.

While on a crowded bus near the Vatican, a man named Mallon - visiting Italy on business - feels someone reaching into his pockets, searching for his wallet. He elbows the pickpocket, seriously injuring the man. Driven by his guilty conscience, Mallon finds himself peering in on the life of an unfamiliar culture and learning more about the world than he ever could have imagined.

When Joe Reed was a teenager, he fell so deeply in love with Mary Claude Moore that his parents threatened to send him away. Decades later, he's living a normal life with his wife and their two children; yet in the thirty years since he's last seen Mary Claude, he hasn't stopped thinking of her. With recent news of her in hand, Joe begins to understand the reasons for which he has never stopped loving her - and just how pivotal that time in his life had been.

Gilbert saw Mary Ann first, but the second time he sees her she is dancing with his best friend, Rafe. The three of them begin hanging out all the time, driving around in the car Rafe got as a present for getting into Yale. But when Rafe goes out of town, Gilbert and Mary Ann keep the tradition going, seeing movies and going on drives...in Rafe's car no less.

Lying stiffly in their separate beds, a husband and his wife are woken in the middle of the night to the sound of their fighting neighbors. There are three of them - a man, a woman, and a young child. With their blasting stereos, violent interludes, and steamy make-up sessions, the wife has had enough. The husband, however, is preoccupied with other thoughts - sex, movies, and humanity's capacity to adapt and change.

Lady, suffocating in the car on a hot summer's day, slips into a feverish dream. Robert, her husband, watches her slip into unconsciousness as he drives. He's a soldier, a man of principle, well-educated and well-adjusted. But Robert is also a man with an agenda; he has married this young, wild lower-class girl to spite his father, and now he regrets it. How much does Lady know about Robert's intentions, and how far will he go to set things straight?

García, the wealthy, swaggering son of a foreign dictator, invites two lower-class boys from his boarding school to have dinnerin New York along with his Spanish-speaking stepmother, Linda. When the groupdecides to go to a kitschy, unpretentious Swedish smorgasbord rather than a fine restaurant, García refuses to leave the limousine, still angry with Linda after an argument over money. Linda proves to be more than the young men had anticipated, and she has more influence over them during their brief encounter than they will ever know.

John didn't want a dog. He wasn't ready, he said. Grace, on the other hand, did want a dog, and when she brought Victor home from the pound, John made sure Grace knew it was her dog, her responsibility. But when Grace dies, John is left with just Victor and his grief, and he learns a new level of devotion.

Sergeant Morse is a risk-taker, playing chicken with the potential exposure of his sexuality. Julianne is looking for her brother, Specialist Hart, not knowing he’s shipped out to Iraq. In a surprising moment of tenderness, Sergeant Morse offers to help her, but whether due to fear of exposure or stubbornness, they might both be beyond rescue.

Mr. Givens’ obituary is nothing remarkable, hardly something to remember at all. He led a quiet life, served in the Army, was married to the same woman for 42 years, and worked at the same job practically his whole life. He wasn’t a baseball player or a movie star, he was the furthest thing from a celebrity. In fact, the only thing noteworthy about his obituary is what happens after it runs in the newspaper, when he shows up in the office of the Metro editor wondering who decided to pronounce him dead.

Hooper, a Vietnam veteran, finds himself at an army base in Washington State. His days are uneventful, filled with mundane duties, empty conversations, and the occasional jaunt with a married woman. A phone call in the middle of the night breaks Hooper's predictable routine. One of the guards at the communications center is threatening to kill himself - and says he'll shoot the other guard if he interferes. Hooper goes to talk to the distressed soldier, a cook nicknamed "Porkchop" who's disappointed by his life as an army man.

Mark's parents have never done a thing for him. When he got out of the army and married Krystal, they were against it, just as they are against his moving to Los Angeles. But Mark has a dream, a dream of being an entertainer, of having a show in Las Vegas. So he packs Krystal and their son, Hans, into their car and starts driving from Arizona to California, determined to show his parents how wrong they are to doubt him. But when the car breaks down at a small gas station in the desert, Mark and Krystal are forced to face realities about their future and their marriage.

With his marriage on the rocks, a father takes his son skiing for the weekend. After insisting on staying just a bit longer - despite a growing blizzard - the boy's father finds they're snowed in at the resort, the road blockaded by state troopers. To what lengths will he go to keep his marriage intact?