From The Paris Review:
In an interview published in The Paris Review no. 171 (Fall 2004), Tobias Wolff pinpointed the radical power of a well-written story. “Good stories slip past our defenses—we all want to know what happens next—and then slow time down, and compel our interest and belief in other lives than our own, so that we feel ourselves in another presence. It’s a kind of awakening, a deliverance, it cracks our shell and opens us up to the truth and singularity of others—to their very being.”
The Paris Review has always sought out just this kind of writing, of which Wolff’s own body of work is an extraordinary example. We are thrilled to honor him with the Hadada, our award for lifetime achievement in literature. Previous recipients include Joan Didion, Philip Roth, Lydia Davis, Jamaica Kincaid, and Vivian Gornick.
Over the last several decades, Wolff has established himself as a virtuosic storyteller across several forms. His memoirs, novels, and short stories express, in infinite variety, the human struggle to reconcile the truth we wish for with the one we get. In This Boy’s Life (1989), his memoir about a peripatetic childhood—which won a Los Angeles Times Book Prize—and Old School (2003), his novel modeled in part on his own disastrous attempt to fit in at an elite prep school, he captures the vulnerability of youth with precision and delicacy.
More here.