Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal. You are a very special breed, or you are the only animal, who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hi, and welcome to Bookworm.

From KCRW, Santa Monica.

I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

I'm happy to have, as my guest today, Tobias Wolf, the, well, wonderful writer of stories and memoirs. His most recent book is

a new and selected stories. Our Story begins, and it's, of course, published by Knopf, his longtime

publisher. And, well, I guess the obvious place to start is that you talk about the way in which

stories change from appearance to appearance. And I know that almost every writer I speak to actually

silently does this.

Each time a story appears, it's time to look again and kind of see if there's some glaring

things still in the story that ought to be gone or some beat that needs to be put in.

How much did these stories change as they made their way into this book this time?

Some of them not very much, all of them to some extent.

You know, I mean, even, you know, there is no er, there is no virginal version of any of these stories which I've altered. I have been changing

these stories ever since my first conception of them. So at any given time before a story

appears in a publication, it's already been revised many times. Then when it appears in a publication,

let's say it's in trric Quarterly or Harpers,

I'll work with an editor there. They might have some good suggestions. Most I won't take, some I will.

Then when it goes to a hardcover publication, I'll look at it again and make changes. When it goes to an anthology,

as many of these stories have, I'll look at it again when it goes into paperback and so on,

and even subsequent editions. So all the stories in here have been subject to that kind of

...