For more than three decades, Tobias Wolff has honed the craft of making sublime art out of the short-story form. —San Francisco Chronicle

Wolff’s voice is unfailingly authentic, while his embrace of the variety of American experience is knowing, forgiving and all-encompassing. —New York Times Book Review

Wolff reminds us again and again why we still return to fiction for what we need to know about how people live their lives. —Esquire

Next Tuesday, October 7th Litquake presents its second annual Barbary Coast Award to author and Stanford professor Tobias Wolff at the fabulous new Contemporary Jewish Museum. Emceed by Michael Krasny from KQED, the all-star lineup will include a host of Wolff friends, associates, and former students, from Tom Perrotta to George Saunders, Tom Barbash, Stephen Elliott, Adam Johnson, Tom Kealey, Graham Leggat, and Ann Packer. A special performance by Word for Word Performing Arts Company begins the show. Wolff’s newest collection, Our Story Begins, features the classic short about a bank robbery, “Bullet In the Brain,” so run out and buy it from your favorite store today. Museum is at 736 Mission Street, doors open at 7 pm, and program starts at 7:30 pm. Tickets are available online in advance.

The day after 9/11, local writer Tamim Ansary sent an anguished e-mail to 20 friends, discussing the attack from his perspective as an Afghan American. The message reached millions. Two years later, he published a riveting memoir, West of Kabul, East of New York, which has been selected as San Francisco’s One City One Book 2008 honoree. On Monday, October 6, Litquake and the Mechanic’s Institute Library will present Ansary and fellow authors from Afghanistan and Iran in a panel discussion, “East of Istanbul: Voices from the Muslim World.” The panel includes Anita Amirrezvani, Persis Karim, and Niloufar Talebi, moderated by radio journalist Sandip Roy, host of the program “Up Front,” which airs weekly on KALW. Tickets are $12 at the door, and free for library members. One City One Book events continue in the Bay Area through the end of October.

The process of getting blurbs — which the US journalist Rob Walker has termed “blurb-harvesting” — is thought, by some, to be a necessary part of modern book publishing. You send the manuscript of your book to another writer, hoping they’ll like it, hoping they will give you a favourable comment to put on the cover. It’s a weird transaction. No money changes hands. There is only one unspoken convention: if somebody blurbs your book, you should not blurb theirs. Not until a decent amount of time has elapsed, anyway. So you’re asking somebody who is probably busy, and possibly even a rival, to do some work on your behalf, for nothing in return. – the metaphysics of book blurbing, by William Leith in the Guardian