Tag: Tobias Wolff

‘Bullet in the Brain’ by Tobias Wolff

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

‘Bullet in the Brain’ by Tobias Wolff

As this shenanigans is called ‘a personal anthology’ and short stories are resolutely about (or connected to) trauma, I wanted to share a story that reflects a shock I got this summer. A friend of forty years – who lived abroad – died suddenly of cardiac arrest and I was talking to her within the same hour she passed. It was such a blow to all of us who knew, loved (and worried about) her and I keep thinking of Bullet in the Brainever since. My dear friend was a medical practitioner and I tortured myself wondering if she knew what was happening in the ten seconds or so before falling unconscious? The slowing down of time, those last frantic flashes and ticks. Here too, inside a lean but taut 1,885 words, a man suffers a bodily trauma he’s no hope of overcoming. Unlike my friend however, he goads the situation into being in the first place. He’s a completely unpleasant character, who happens to be in a bank, in the midst of an aggravated robbery, and he can’t keep his sarcastic gob shut. When the inevitable happens Woolf experiments with time and space, physics and memory, to give us a ‘film of my life’ that’s fairly unforgettable. Incredible idea.

First published in The New Yorker, September 1995 and available to read here; collected in The Night in Question, Knopf / Picador, 1996

‘Bullet in the Brain’ by Tobias Wolff

This story has been picked by several other anthologists, but I can’t leave it out because it’s such a great example of how to use both showing AND telling. To begin with it seems as if we’re in a close-third-person narrative, following Anders, a burned out and cynical literary critic as he stands in a queue at his local bank. In the middle of the story there is a crisis that shouldn’t come as a surprise but does, and at this point the story makes an extraordinary switch, and we realise that we’re in the hands of a highly skilled omniscient narrator. Wolff describes the trajectory of the bullet through the soft tissue of the brain and at the same time takes us on a rapid tour through Anders’ life by listing all the significant emotional moments he has forgotten.

First published in The New Yorker, September 1995 and available to read here; collected in The Night in Question, Knopf / Picador, 1996

‘Bullet in the Brain’ by Tobias Wolff

This story ends in its middle, and then it burrows into itself until it ends again. Time warps so pleasantly here and there’s a playful antagonism at play – Wolff’s protagonist is so dislikable his only hope is either being shot or redeemed with some injection of humanity. Both happen. Reading it is some good release.

First published in The New Yorker, September 17, 1995. Read here. Collected in Our Story Begins, Bloomsbury, 2008

‘Bullet in the Brain’ by Tobias Wolff

This is the best short story I’ve ever read. There, I’ve said it. I don’t want to give too much away about what happens, but it’s the story of Anders, am embittered literary critic, who was once generous and hopeful. There’s an extraordinary section in which Wolff slows time down, but what’s really remarkable about this story is how he gives us Anders’ entire life and significant relationships in just a few pages. It has the most perfectly placed adjective I can think of – check out that “sullen” four pages in. And the ending – oh my god. A story for anyone who has sometimes wondered whether they love books more than life.

First published in The New Yorker, 1995, and available to read online here. Collected in Our Story Begins, Bloomsbury, 2008

‘Hunters in the Snow’ by Tobias Wolff

Wolff is a fantastic writer of short stories – but I’ve chosen this story as illustrative of something that runs across all great story writers. The short story form gives you a great deal of freedom. You don’t need to worry about anything except the thing you are writing now. You don’t need length, development, incident. But you do need to stick the knife in, and then you need to twist. Wolff does this, and does it again.

First published in In the Garden of North American Martyrs, WW Norton, 1982; collected in Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories, Bloomsbury, 2008. Available online here

‘Bullet in the Brain’ by Tobias Wolff

The last paragraph of this – the final, split-second thought (of a childhood baseball game in the heat of summer) as a bullet shatters through his skull – is one of the most heartbreakingly beautiful things I’ve ever read. 

First published in The New Yorker, September 1995, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in The Night in Question, Bloomsbury, 1995

‘An Episode in the Life of Professor Brooke’, by Tobias Wolff

Around 2000, when I started writing stories seriously, I discovered, in a fated and improbable sort of way, The Granta Book of the American Short Story, edited by Richard Ford, among a pile of unwanted books dumped in the hallway of the block of flats where I was living. This anthology turned out to be my route into the work of so many wonderful writers – a number of whom are on this list – exactly as an anthology should. Tobias Wolff was one of them. In 2008 I went to a conference in Cork, mainly because Wolff was going to be there, reading his work. My own collection was about to come out and I was carrying the manuscript around in my bag, with some idea that I would find a way to give it to him, following which he would read it and insist on providing a quote for the cover that would celebrate my genius. In the event, someone did introduce me to him, but I bottled the moment. Instead he signed my copy of his collected stories ‘with best wishes for your own work’ which in the end felt good enough.

In ‘An Episode in the Life of Professor Brooke’, an academic is obliged to attend a conference with a flashy colleague that he despises, in part because of his ‘unnecessarily large moustache’. In the end it is Brooke who behaves poorly and he and we are left wondering exactly what sort of man he is. With all very good or great writers it is extremely difficult to say what it is that they do or how they do it – certainly without making a fool of yourself. In this story it is something about the exquisitely achieved tone, the gap between the narrative voice and Brooke’s own, the way the relative plainness of the language and directness of the storytelling belie a vast understanding of moral and human complexity.  Something like that.

First published in In the Garden of the North American Martyrs (Ecco Press, 1981) and anthologised in The Granta Book of the American Short Story.