Tobias Wolff is a master story writer, whose name should be mentioned alongside Raymond Carver’s in any account of the short story’s much-noted 1980s renaissance. Unlike Carver, Mr. Wolff is still very much with us, and the 10 new stories collected in “Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories” (Knopf, $26.95, 379 pages) show no sign of a slackening.

With “This Boy’s Life” (1989), his memoir, the present collection represents a summary of Mr. Wolff’s claim to enduring importance in the recent history of American literature. Even the title — “Our Story Begins” — suggests the universal blandness that this claim might seem to offer: Mr. Wolff as minimalist, as highly disciplined torchbearer of Hemingway’s ever-increasingly teachable art. But the experience of reading Mr. Wolff’s best stories offers something quite different: an impression that Mr. Wolff is more idiosyncratic and self-conscious than the kindly, pared-down face his author photograph puts forward.

Most of Mr. Wolff’s best characters are crackerjack storytellers. Some of them are almost precious, such as Webster, the red-blazered, mustached con man who hijacks “The Rich Brother,” otherwise a tale of fraternal conflict, and tries to sell the quarreling brothers a gold mine in Peru: “A vein of gold greater than the Mother Lode itself.” Others are simply mouthpieces for Mr. Wolff’s extended fictional jokes. Mary, the long-discreet professor of “In the Garden of the North American Martyrs,” suddenly unloads a politically incorrect lecture of Iroquois barbarism, shocking her audience.

These belong to a spectrum of American malcontents, stretching from the benign Walter Mitty to the sinister charm of Mark Twain’s dauphin. Mr. Wolff’s fiction, more so than that of Carver, reaches out to a large and parti-colored tapestry of American influences. He seems to revel in the carnivalesque variety of his own stories: descending into the warm, rote fellowship that follows an all-night cocaine binge, detailing the chain of command in a boyhood project to build a jet aircraft, following a miserable hunting party into the suburban woods. It is telling, though surprising, that Mr. Wolff helped discover George Saunders, the incisive cartoonist of America’s soul.

Some of Mr. Wolff’s best stories seem designed specifically to showcase the wild differences between worlds that other writers would not dare bring together. “Firelight,” a well-anthologized story, follows a young boy and his single mother into an upper-class home, where the boy falls in love with the working fireplace, only to have his romance corrected when, walking home, his mother calls their host a “blowhard.” In “Desert Breakdown, 1968,” an ex-serviceman named Mark brings his young German wife and baby into the deserts of California, on his way to a job in “the entertainment field.” Mark and Krystal are awkward, transnational. Their car breaks down in Blythe, at a gas station so run-down that Krystal takes pictures of the stone-faced “cowboys” sitting around outside. These salty gentlemen become her caretakers as Mark goes to hitchhike his way toward a new alternator — and once he’s up on the freeway he discovers a totally new world. Picked up by a carful of roadies, Mark sees his first mohawk hairdo and marvels at the driver’s word games. Meanwhile, Krystal’s hosts shoot rabbits for dinner.

Any of these stories could be called contrived, and the very best among them are those that are almost all premise — such as “Mortals,” a story about a careless obituary reporter who is confronted by a man who is supposed to be dead. Mr. Wolff’s many telltale observations make the story run, but it is the premise that is the payoff.

As Vietnam shaped much of Mr. Wolff’s work in the 1980s, current social interests form the premises of many of the new stories in “Our Story Begins.” A gay army officer considers the routine inconveniences of workplace discretion in “Awaiting Orders”; a refugee of the Soviet bloc buttonholes an ex-marine in “A Mature Student.” The most memorable — and unbelievable — of these more topical stories is “A White Bible,” a tale of Arab assimilation in upstate New York. Maureen, a teacher at St. Ignatius, has threatened to expel Hassan, a lazy student caught cheating one too many times. His father stalks Maureen, hoping only to secure her promise that she will not punish Hassan. His rhetoric — about God, about American’s obsession with sex, about alcohol — has a very canned quality, and for a moment we are happy to root for Maureen’s professional stubbornness: She is very confident that Hassan deserves expulsion. What is memorable, however, is the closing symbol: Hassan’s father produces a girl’s leatherette Bible. He had hoped to have Maureen swear on it. “‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘You really thought you could save him.'” Poetic justice is the congenital weakness of the highly crafted short story, but Mr. Wolff always makes it a pleasure.

blytal@nysun.com