The story begins with 31 wonderful stories by Tobias Wolff

I tell people who tell me they want to write to do two things:

(1) Write something every day.

(2) Read the best stuff you can get your hands on. Our story begins: New and Selected Stories by Tobias Wolff is one of the best things I've gotten my hands on recently.

The book published in 2008, contains 21 stories from earlier collections, plus 10 new

stories. In his author's note, Wolff asked himself about this book: "Should I present my stories, of whatever vintage [some are 30 years old], in their original form? Or should I allow myself the liberty of revisiting them here and there?"

I am sure every writer, looking at earlier work, sees ways to improve, to tinker, to touch up. While there is a good argument for leaving the published text alone, there is, I believe, a better one to edit. "The truth is that I have never regarded my stories as sacred texts," writes Woolf. "If I see a clumsy or superfluous passage, so will you, and why should I throw you out of the story with an irritation I could have prevented? Where I have felt the need for something better I have answered the need as best I can, for now."

Because Woolf wrote the 31 stories over a 30-year period, they cover an enormous range of subjects, themes, and settings. We are in the peacetime Army, in prep school, teaching college, married, single, a child. "For two days now, Miller has been standing in the rain with the rest of Bravo Company, waiting for some men from another company to blunder down the logging road where Bravo waits in ambush."  So begins "The Other Miller" putting the reader into a muddy foxhole with Miller.

"'A prep school in March is like a ship in the doldrums.' Our history master said this, as if to himself, while we were waiting for the bell to ring after class." So beings "Smorgasbord" putting the reader into the head of a prep student narrator.

"The number 64 bus stops at St. Peter's, so it's always crammed with pilgrims or suckers, depending on your pont of view—a happy hunting ground for pickpockets. Mallon was not a pilgrim, or by his own reckoning a sucker." So begins "The Benefit of the Doubt," in which Mallon, in Rome, indulges the Gypsy who has attempted to pick his pocket.

Although Wolff is widely anthologized, I recognized only one story, "A White Bible," perhaps because I read it in Best American Short Stories; it is unforgettable. A female schoolteacher is accosted at her car and forced to drive to a remote spot by a man who turns out to be a student's father. The confrontation between a single American woman who has actually had an alcoholic drink on a Friday after work and a puritanical immigrant Islamic man who only wants the best for his son is powerful, convincing, and moving.

All I can say is, see if you can get your hands on a copy of Our story begins.

In "Birds of America" the language soars

Now that I've read (and written about) Stanley Fish on sentences, I've been thinking about my sentences and have become sensitive to other writers' sentences. Fish talks about the

importance of first sentences, and I've just finished reading a short story collection that is a model of how to write a first sentence that pulls the reader into the story.

—In her last picture, the camera had lingered at the hip, the naked hip, and even though it wasn't her hip, she acquired a reputation for being willing.

—It was a fear greater than death, according to the magazines.

—I tell them dance begins when a moment of hurt combines with a moment of boredom.

—When Olena was a little girl, she had called them lie-berries—a fibbing fruit, a story store—and now she had a job in one.

—Her mother had given her the name Agnes, believing that a good-looking woman was even more striking when her name was a homely one.

Five first sentences from the first five stories in Lorrie Moore's Birds of America. All different, all engaging. Indeed, I imagine that one of the challenges of writing so well at the sentence level is that readers will pay more attention to the writing than to the story. It may be a problem for Moore because more than once I was stopped by an absolutely lovely sentence, a perfect metaphor and briefly pulled out of the story.

But for Moore, I'll let it pass. It's a little like complaining that the meal was so delicious I couldn't eat.

While there are certain repeating themes in these dozen stories—people who are lost, couples who find it hard to live together, families in crisis—there is also lightness and humor. A woman who mourns the death of her cat goes through the five stages of grief: Anger, Denial, Bargaining, Häagen Dazs, Rage. And while I responded more to some stories than others, that I think is the nature of a story collection and another reader will find a story that did not engage me to be the best in the book.

I tell aspiring writers to read the best stuff they can get their hands on. One cannot do better than study Birds of America for its range, for its language, for its structures.