Tobias Wolff. (2004). Old School. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Tobias Wolff. 2004. Old School. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Tobias Wolff, Old School. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2004.

Tobias Wolff. Old School. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2004.

OverDrive Product Record

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1. • value: family
2. • value: literary fiction
3. • value: prep school
4. • value: 1960's
5. • value: Fiction
6. • value: novels
7. • value: new england
8. • value: Coming of age
9. • value: American
10. • value: plagiarism
11. • value: Contemporary
12. • value: boarding school
13. • value: old school
14. • value: memoir
15. • value: literature
16. • value: fiction books
17. • value: best selling books for women
18. • value: popular books for women
19. • value: books for adults
20. • value: Tobias Wolff
21. • value: books for young women
22. • value: realistic fiction books
23. • value: award winning books for adults
24. • value: best books for book clubs
25. • value: books for women best sellers
26. • value: novels for women best sellers
27. • value: valentines day gifts for boyfriend
28. • value: popular books for women best sellers

creators

1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Wolff, Tobias
   • bioText: Tobias Wolff lives in Northern California and teaches at Stanford University. He has received the Rea Award for excellence in the short story, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the PEN/Faulkner Award.
   • name: Tobias Wolff

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publishDate

2004-08-31T00:00:00-04:00

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title

Old School

fullDescription

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 alliances, exposing weaknesses, Old School explores the ensuing deceptions and betrayals with an unblinking eye and a bottomless store of empathy. The result is further evidence that Wolff is an authentic American master.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: The Boston Globe
   • content:

     "Ingenious. . . . A tour de force. . . . Achieves a real profundity. "

2. • premium: False
   • source: The Washington Post Book World
   • content: "A sharply drawn, acutely felt novel of moral inquiry. . . . Wolff has put his readers in the landscape tracked across by writers as different as J. M. Coetzee, Philip Roth, and, going back, Conrad and Hawthorne."
3. • premium: False
   • source: The Plain Dealer
   • content: "The kind of deceptively quiet novel that deserves a second, slow reading. An homage to the power of story to move, to awaken and even to transform."
4. • premium: False
   • source: Los Angeles Times
   • content: "Gentle, reserved, graceful. . . . Wolff again proves himself to be a writer of the highest order: part storyteller, part philosopher, someone deeply engaged in asking hard questions."
5. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from October 13, 2003
     A scholarship boy at a New England prep school grapples with literary ambition and insecurity in this lucid, deceptively sedate novel, set in the early 1960s and narrated by the unnamed protagonist from the vantage point of adulthood. Each year, the school hosts a number of visiting writers, and the boys in the top form are allowed to compete for a private audience by composing a poem or story. The narrator judges the skills of his competitors, avidly exposing his classmates' weaknesses and calculating their potential ("I knew better than to write George off.... He could win.... Bill was a contender"). His own chances are hurt by his inability to be honest with himself and examine his ambivalent feelings about his Jewish roots. After failing to win audiences with Robert Frost and Ayn Rand, he is determined to be chosen by the last and best guest, legendary Ernest Hemingway. The anxiety of influence afflicts all the boys, but in crafting his final literary offering, the narrator discovers inspiration in imitation, finding his voice in someone else's. The novel's candid, retrospective narration ruefully depicts its protagonist's retreat further and further behind his public facade ("I'd been absorbed so far into my performance that nothing else came naturally"). Beneath its staid trappings, this is a sharply ironic novel, in which love of literature is counterbalanced by bitter disappointment (as one character bluntly puts it, " just cuts you off and makes you selfish and doesn't really do any good"). Wolff, an acclaimed short story writer (The Night in Question
     , etc.) and author of the memoir This Boy's Life,
     here offers a delicate, pointed meditation on the treacherous charms of art. (Nov. 9)
     
     Forecast:
     This is Wolff's first full-length novel (and his first book in seven years) and as such will likely receive much critical attention. Fans of the author's short stories—regularly published in the
     New Yorker—should be pleased by his departure from form.

popularity

169

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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 alliances, exposing weaknesses, Old School explores the ensuing deceptions and betrayals with an unblinking eye and a bottomless store of empathy. The result is further evidence that Wolff is an authentic American master.

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awards

1. • source: PEN/Faulkner Foundation
   • value: PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist
2. • source: The National Book Critics Circle
   • value: National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist

publisher

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

bisacCodes

1. • code: FIC019000
   • description: Fiction / Literary
2. • code: FIC043000
   • description: Fiction / Coming of Age
3. • code: FIC045000
   • description: Fiction / Family Life / General