In spite of all the top-rate university programs, the hundreds of literary quarterlies and a reading public that still has an appetite for short fiction, it remains hard in America to find a short-story writer who has something to say, and says it well.

Tobias Wolff is the exception. For the past 30 years, he has been publishing stories that feel yanked from the jagged mouth of real experience and turned into art. He writes gracefully of soldiers, lovers, dogs and families. He knows a thing or two about California. Enter his world and you will be told a story in the old-fashioned way. Something happens; matters of the heart are often at stake. Finish one and you'll need to pause before reading the next.

At this rate there is at least two months' worth of reading pleasure in "Our Story Begins," Wolff's latest collection of new and selected stories. The book starts with fiction Wolff published in the early 1980s and concludes with some bracing recent work, some of which will be familiar to faithful readers of the New Yorker. Even if you have been following Wolff all along, this volume just begs to be brought home and read.

It's hard not to marvel at how Wolff makes telling a story seem so utterly natural. He writes short, easygoing sentences, and is funny without showing off. He lets his characters (often the talkative ones) take the glory. (In the hilarious and taut "Next Door," the narrator takes to calling his manhood "Old Florida.") Wolff understands, as few contemporary fiction writers do, that most of what we say to one another is junk -- and that's what he has to work with as a realist. Still, when the pathos descends on the page in one of his tales, it falls like a hammer.

Most of all, Wolff allows his characters to be actors in their own lives. One way or other, they make decisions that bear grave consequences. In "The Chain," a man whose daughter is attacked by a dog gives in to the desire for revenge and sets off a sequence of events that go far beyond what he intended. In "That Room," a young man on his way to adulthood lucks out on a drunken night, learning a lesson in empathy that a whole summer of working beside migrant laborers could not teach him.

Wolff is often called a moral storyteller, which means that even his most passive characters are involved in a situation that tests their rectitude. In "The Other Miller," the army mistakenly tells a soldier his mother has died. Driving back to civilian life, Miller, who knows it's an error, can barely contain his glee. Not only is his mother alive, but he gets a break. Gradually, though, the karmic wrongness of his celebration hits him. And then Wolff reveals the real reason -- the nasty, sadder one -- for why Miller is celebrating.

One after the other, the tales in "Our Story Begins" perform this shattering turnabout: the entire moral crux of a life pivots on (or falls apart in) an instant. "Bullet in the Brain" is another such tale. A snide and sarcastic book critic walks into a bank robbery and proceeds to critique the gunmen's lingo. Not surprisingly, he winds up dead on the floor. But what is shocking is how much pathos Wolff extracts from the flickering final moments of the angry man's mind.

Looking at "Our Story Begins," it's clear Wolff has done just about everything. He has told gripping stories in the first person and in the third. Some of his tales do loop-de-loops. Others are swift as bullets. All of them, however, feel true. It sounds odd to say that, especially in this age of "truthiness." So perhaps it's better to say this: These stories remind how powerful and important good stories are, especially ones that look right into our furtive, yearning hearts and refuse to blink.

John Freeman, president of the National Book Critics Circle, is writing a book on the tyranny of e-mail for Scribner. He lives in New York City.