I could quote those lines here, but it wasn’t the words, it was what they meant—and in, turn, what they made the story mean. In the time between putting down the book and picking up the bologna, all that meaning had churned through my subconscious. Finally, it bubbled over. The story provided me with just the sort of epiphany you see in so many classically structured short stories: “His hand on the bologna, Pete suddenly realized…” This is what the best short stories do: they tool around in the reader’s unconscious mind via symbol and the insinuations of thoughtful prose, and the effects there can be dramatic.

Our Story Begins is a hybrid; ten new stories preceded by 21 favorites from Wolff’s three previous collections (including “Mortals”). The dramas here are firmly realist: a hunting accident, a coke binge, a stranger’s charity, a soldier’s boredom. But with a gentle and steady focus, Wolff imbues each with cosmic stakes. The trick is in his unflinching attention to the consciousness of his characters, where they, like all of us, make decisions and reflect on meaning itself. Some of these stories even address consciousness head on. “Bullet in the Brain” traces a man’s thinking as he dies. In “That Room,” one of the new stories, a man recounts a memory from his youth that replays in his mind in unexpected moments. A widower conducts an entire, imaginary argument with his wife’s dog as they make their way through her favorite trail, in “Her Dog.” With such a fullness of mind, it’s no wonder that these characters take actions that, however small, matter so much.