SOURCE: Sutcliffe, Thomas. “Things Falling Apart.” Times Literary Supplement (30 July 1982): 815.

In the following review, Sutcliffe calls Hunters in the Snow dispiriting and remarks that the stories' individual strengths are overshadowed by the collection's dejected tone.

Short stories are sometimes referred to as if they were an endangered species, urgently in need of acts of conservation by well-disposed publishers and fiction editors who can commission collections and anthologies. Reading Hunters in the Snow it is hard not to feel that in some cases benign neglect might be a more effective policy, leaving the genre to work out its own survival in the environment of glossy monthlies and literary reviews. It isn't that Tobias Wolff's collection contains a single story that shouldn't have been published at some time, somewhere. His melancholy and regretful accounts of the hazards of sociable solitude and the pitfalls of the urbane jungle might have contrasted...