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Dirty Realism
Wolff rose to fame in the 1980s for publishing gritty, honest short stories such as “Bullet in the Brain.” Along with authors like Raymond Carver, Wolff was thought to be the face of the American short story renaissance, though Wolff himself rejected this, insisting that there was no such thing; for there to be a renaissance, he insists in the introduction to The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories, there first needed to be “dark age,” and “[t]he truth is that the short story form has reliably inspired brilliant performances by our best writers, in a line unbroken since the time of Poe.”
Though Wolff may have rejected the existence of the American short story revival, his name is undeniably linked to late 20th-century short story fiction, and with the American literary movement known as “dirty realism” in particular. The term emerged in the 1980s, coined by author and journalist Bill Buford in Granta magazine in 1984, to celebrate the honest and gritty realism of late 20th-century North American literature. Buford described it as “the fiction of a new generation of American authors. They write about the belly-side of contemporary life—a deserted husband, an unwanted mother, a car thief, a pickpocket, a drug addict—but they write about it with a disturbing detachment, at times verging on comedy. Understated, ironic, sometimes savage, but insistently compassionate, these stories constitute a new voice in fiction.” Wolff’s work was featured in the article. Dirty realism is typically characterized by a minimalistic writing style and an exploration off the daily mundanities of life, featuring unremarkable people who live unremarkable lives. Such a description is certainly applicable to Anders from "Bullet in the Brain," who is largely defined by his quiet, resigned ordinariness.
