Old School
by Tobias Wolff · first published 2003
3mentions
2recommended by
3HN commenters
2015–2025first – last mentioned
67% recommend33% neutral
The author of the genre-defining memoir This Boy's Life, the PEN/Faulkner Award--winning novella The Barracks Thief, and short stories acclaimed as modern classics, Tobias Wolff now gives us his first novel.Determined to fit in at his New England prep school, the narrator has learned to mimic the bearing and manners of his adoptive tribe while concealing as much as possible about himself. His final year, however, unravels everything he's achieved, and steers his destiny in directions no one could have predicted. The school's mystique is rooted in Literature, and for many boys this becomes an o
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…in power in Seoul. It committed countless atrocities to achieve its stalemate, including fire-bombing half the country (Germany redux) and using napalm on whole villages, a foreshadowing of Vietnam. * Old School - A novel by Tobias Wolff. If you're tired of tired prose, try Wolff. He cares about sentences.
on “The Best Books I Read in 2015” ↗…enjoyable) A Study in Scarlet - Arthur Conan Doyle (recommended) Why Gender Matters - Leonard Sax (recommended; most of the book is based on good science, but he does go out on a limb a time or two.) Old School - Tobias Wolff (recommended; a world before widespread TV where high school boys actually got excited about literature) Infinite Space, Infinite God - Karina and Robert Fabian editors (story quality…
on “Ask HN: Books you read in 2016?” ↗"So did Achilles lose his friend in war, and Homer did no injustice to his grief by writing about it in dactylic hexameters" - Tobias Wolff, Old School
on “1D Conway's Life glider found, 3.7B cells long” ↗