An ex-marine grapples with her son's decision to fight in Iraq; an American foreign aid worker, disillusioned by his fat-check colleagues, is wittingly robbed by street children; and a hotshot lawyer taking on a charity case in small-town U.S.A. allows himself a What's the Matter with Kansas? rant: "And still they ate it up, and voted like robbers instead of the robbed." These are among the figures both lost and found in Our Story Begins (Knopf), the latest collection of short stories from Tobias Wolff. With 10 new narratives alongside 21 classics, this anthology — the author's first in over a decade — confirms his mastery of the packed punch, not to mention the tangled, improbable relationships that tend to crop up between complete strangers. In "Mortals," a Mr. Givens misleadingly reports his own death to the local newspaper, wanting to gauge his potential for remembrance. "Your problem is, you think everything has to mean something," he says to his obituarist when they eventually meet up. "That was one of my problems, I couldn't deny it," the hoodwinked reporter muses, perhaps lamenting the fate of all writers. With their flurries of Northwest weather and their meticulously placed characters, these stories are delicately crafted, like snow globes of worlds in miniature.

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