I’m sorry to be the seventh person to choose this Wolff story – he has written other great stories – but it really is a corker. It’s the story of a book critic, Anders, who can’t keep his trap shut during an armed robbery and gets shot in the head as a result. And I loved it when I first read it 30 years ago, but I love it even more now that I too am a book critic and can take Anders’s story in part as a warning on the corrosive qualities of cynicism. Most of all though, it really is the exquisite, surprising, last scene and closing lines that tip this story into the pantheon of greats. How does he do it? And more to the point – since Wolff hasn’t published an all-new collection of stories since the one this one appeared in 30 years ago – why doesn’t he do it a bit more?
First published in the New Yorker, 18 Sep 1995, where it can be read online, and collected in The Night in Question, Bloomsbury, 1995) and subsequently in Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories, Bloomsbury, 2008
A Personal Anthology 