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presented by the Library Foundation of Los Angeles


Title:   Our Story Begins
Participants:   Tobias Wolff
In conversation with David L. Ulin, editor, Los Angeles Times Book Review
Program Date:    4/28/2008
Program length:    1hr
Media Type:   MP3

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Podcast summary

One of America's "most exquisite storytellers" (Esquire), a master of the memoir and the short story, reads from and discusses his first collection in over a decade.


Participant(s) Bio

Born in Alabama in 1945, Tobias Wolff traveled the country with his mother, finally settling in Washington State, where he grew up. He attended the Hill School in Pennsylvania until he was expelled for repeated failures in mathematics in his final year, whereupon he joined the Army. He spent four years as a paratrooper, including a tour in Vietnam. Following his discharge he attended Oxford University in England, where he received a First Class Honours degree in English in 1972. Returning to the United States, he worked variously as a reporter, a night watchman, a waiter and a high school teacher before receiving a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing at Stanford University in 1975. He is currently Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor in the Humanities at Stanford.

His books include the memoirs This Boy's Life and In Pharaoh's Army; the short novel The Barracks Thief; three collections of stories, In The Garden of the North American Martyrs, Back in the World, and The Night in Question; and, most recently, the novel Old School. He has also edited several anthologies, among them Best American Short Stories, A Doctor's Visit: The Short Stories of Anton Chekhov, and The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Stories. His work is translated widely and has received numerous awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the PEN/Malamud Award and the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

David L. Ulin is book editor of the Los Angeles Times. He is the author of The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction, and the Fault Line Between Reason and Faith, and the editor of Another City: Writing from Los Angeles and Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which won a California Book Award. He has written for The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, LA Weekly, Los Angeles, and National Public Radio's All Things Considered.


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ALOUD audio is presented by the Library Foundation of Los Angeles and made possible through support provided by The Ralph M. Parsons Foundation, the Annenberg Foundation, City National Bank, KPMG, Donna and Martin J. Wolff, the law firm Arent Fox, and through the support of The Library Associates. Media support provided by KPPC 83.9 FM, KUSC 91.5 FM and KCET. ALOUD theme composed by Larry Karush.
The Library Foundation of Los Angeles secures private support to help provide the Los Angeles Public Library with everything from books and materials to reading enrichment programs, technology, cultural events, exhibitions and select capital improvements.
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