Product Description

A collection of Raymond Carver stories from the 1980s.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #544077 in Books
• Published on: 1998-09-17
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

From the Back Cover
'One of America's most original, truest voices.' Salman Rushdie

'Some of the finest and most original stories of their generation.' Robet Houston, Nation

This powerful collection of stories, set in the mid-west among the lonely men and women who drink, fish and play cards to ease the passing of time, was the first by Raymond Carver to be published in the UK. With its spare, colloquial narration and razor-sharp sense of how people really communicate, the collection was to become one of the most influential literary works of the 1980s.

'These brilliant shards - some no more than three or four pages long - confirm Carver's place in the hall of America's great writers and suggest that, with his hero Chekhov, he was one of the world's masters of the short story.' Times Literary Supplement

'Raymond Carver uses the English language like a whittler's knife, carving stark and unadorned prose objects, paring everything away but the very core of human emotion ... The collection as a whole, unlike most, begins to grow and resonate in a wonderful cumulative effect.' Tim O'Brien. Chicago Tribune

Customer Reviews

Who we talk about when we talk about love.
A thousand words to talk about Carver's best (in my opinion) selection of short stories? How about a thousand pages? Raymond Carver was an artist from heaven, the great american writer that never wrote the great american novel. Many writers have taken their inspiration from the everyday, but few had the dizzying, misleading, precision that he did, chronicling the things that litter the roadsides of our lives; problems with family, problems with money, problems with drink, he prodded at them all with a searing accuracy. Lots of his stories concern drinkers or ex drinkers, couples on the verge of, or just coming off of, a split. Tear inducing, heart breaking, sometimes stomach churning, but nearly always, somehow, life affirming. From the playfulness of "Viewfinder" to the sheer white heat of misdirected emotions in the title story, this collection finds the artist at the peak of his storytelling powers but also, for those unfamiliar with his work, at his most accessable.