Tobias Wolff provided a definition of the guiding principles behind his own stories in explaining his choices of the works of others for Matters of Life and Death (1983), the anthology of contemporary short fiction he edited: "They [these writers] speak to us, without flippancy, about things that matter. They write about what happens between men and women, parents and children. They write about fear of death, fear of life, the feelings that bring people together and force them apart, the costs of intimacy. They remind us that our house is built on sand. They are, every one of them, interested in what it means to be human." In a review of Wolff's first collection, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs (1981), Brina Caplan ( Nation, 6 February 1982) described him as engaged in scrutinizing "the disorders of daily living to find significant order." What his reviewers have consistently understood, and what Wolff himself implies, is that his is a genuinely humanistic fiction -- both human and humane.
