Culled from over one hundred prestigious writing programs around the United States and Canada, Best New American Voices 2000 offers a remarkable panoply of writing talent that showcases the literary stars of tomorrow. Included here are twenty of the finest stories to come out of such programs as Breadloaf, the Sewanee Conference, the Banff Centre for the Arts, the University of Iowa, and the PEN/Prison Writing Committee, as nominated by the directors of those programs. Represented are all facets of North American life, a diverse collection of visions and voices that will satisfy the...

The protagonist of Tobias Wolff's shrewdly--and at times devastatingly--observed first novel is a boy at an elite prep school in 1960. He is an outsider who has learned to mimic the negligent manner of his more privileged classmates. Like many of them, he wants more than anything on earth to become a writer. But to do that he must first learn to tell the truth about himself.
The agency of revelation is the school literary contest, whose winner will be awarded an audience with the most legendary writer of his time. As the fever of competition infects the boy and his classmates, fraying...

The author recalls his experiences during the Vietnam war, reminiscing about his service in the Mekong Delta, his feelings about the miltary life, and the impact of the Vietnam experience on his life.

To American soldiers in Vietnam, "back in the world" meant America and safety. To Tobias Wolff's characters, Back in the World is where lives that have veered out of control just might become normal again. Unfortunately, the men and women in these gripping, pungent, and wonderfully skewed stories have only the vaguest notion of what normal is. A gentle priest finds himself in a Vegas hotel with a hysterical, sun-burned stranger. A show-biz hopeful undergoes a dubious audition in a hearse speeding across the California desert. An aging soldier is distracted from a night of philandering...

One of the sinuous and subtly crafted stories in Tobias Wolff's new collection--his first in eleven years--begins with a man biting a dog. The fact that Wolff is reversing familiar expectations is only half the point. The other half is that Wolff makes the reversal seem inevitable: the dog has attacked his protagonist's young daughter. And everywhere in The Night in Question, we are reminded that truth is deceptive, volatile, and often the last thing we want to know.
A young reporter writes an obituary only to be fired when its subject walks into his office, very much alive. A...

In December 1988 Floyd Skloot was stricken by a virus that targeted his brain, leaving him totally disabled and utterly changed. In the Shadow of Memory is an intimate picture of what it is like to find oneself possessed of a ravaged memory and unstable balance and confronted by wholesale changes in both cognitive and emotional powers. Skloot also explores the gradual reassembling of himself, putting together his scattered memories, rediscovering the meaning of childhood and family history, and learning a new way to be at home in the world. Combining the author's skills as a poet and...

A memoir of a young boy's unusual travels with his mother. The author recreates his boyhood experiences, relating how he and his mother travelled throughout the United States, and tracing his experiences and changes from young boy to manhood against the background of a violent and wildly optimistic America.

Memoirs are as varied as human emotion and experience, and those published in the distinguished American Lives Series run the gamut. Excerpted from this series (called splendid by Newsweek) and collected here for the first time, these dispatches from American lives take us from China during the Cultural Revolution to the streets of New York in the sixties to a cabin in the backwoods of Idaho.In prose as diverse as the stories they tell, writers such as Floyd Skloot, Ted Kooser, Peggy Shumaker, and Lee Martin, among many others, open windows to their own ordinary and extraordinary...

Studienarbeit aus dem Jahr 2007 im Fachbereich Politik - Internationale Politik - Region: Russland, Lander der ehemal. Sowjetunion, Note: 2,0, Rheinisch-Westfalische Technische Hochschule Aachen, 28 Quellen im Literaturverzeichnis, Sprache: Deutsch, Abstract: "Seit dem Zerfall der Sowjetunion 1991 beschreitet Russland den schwierigen und muheseligen Weg der Transformation von einem diktatorischen, planwirtschaftlichen Staat in eine prasidiale Marktwirtschaft. Die Verfassung von 1993 bezeichnete Russland als demokratischen, foderalen Rechtsstaat mit republikanischer Regierungsform und legte...