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Raymond Carver: Collected Stories

Edited by William L. Stull and Maureen P. Carroll

“The Library of America Collected Stories is a fascinating event . . . if you haven’t read it you cannot claim, in the fullest sense, to have read Raymond Carver.” — Times Literary Supplement

Overview
Table of Contents

Overview

Raymond Carver’s spare dramas of loneliness, despair, and troubled relationships breathed new life into the American short story of the 1970s and ’80s. In collections such as Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Carver wrote with unflinching exactness about men and women enduring lives on the knife-edge of poverty and other deprivations. Beneath his pared-down surfaces run disturbing, violent undercurrents. Suggestive rather than explicit, and seeming all the more powerful for what is left unsaid, Carver’s stories were held up as exemplars of a new school in American fiction known as minimalism or “dirty realism,” a movement whose wide influence continues to this day. Carver’s stories were brilliant in their detachment and use of the oblique, ambiguous gesture, yet there were signs of a different sort of sensibility at work. In books such as Cathedral and the later tales included in the collected stories volume Where I’m Calling From, Carver revealed himself to be a more expansive writer than in the earlier published books, displaying Chekhovian sympathies toward his characters and relying less on elliptical effects.

In gathering all of Carver’s stories, including early sketches and posthumously discovered works, The Library of America’s Collected Stories provides a comprehensive overview of Carver’s career as we have come to know it: the promise of Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? and the breakthrough of What We Talk About, on through the departures taken in Cathedral and the pathos of the late stories. But it also prompts a fresh consideration of Carver by presenting Beginners, an edition of the manuscript of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love that Carver submitted to Gordon Lish, his editor and a crucial influence on his development. Lish’s editing was so extensive that at one point Carver wrote him an anguished letter asking him not to publish the book; now, for the first time, readers can read both the manuscript and published versions of the collection that established Carver as a major American writer. Offering a fascinating window into the complex, fraught relationship between writer and editor, Beginners expands our sense of Carver and is essential reading for anyone who cares about his achievement.

William L. Stull, editor, is professor of English at the University of Hartford. Maureen P. Carroll, editor, is adjunct professor of humanities at the University of Hartford and a practicing attorney. They have devoted more than two decades to the work of Raymond Carver, publishing numerous essays and editing Conversations with Raymond Carver (1990), Remembering Ray: A Composite Biography (1993), All of Us: The Collected Poems (1996), and Call If You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction and Other Prose (2000).

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

Project support for this volume was provided by The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.
Table of Contents

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
Why Don’t You Dance?
Viewfinder
Mr. Coffee and Mr. Fixit
Gazebo
I Could See the Smallest Things
Sacks
The Bath
Tell the Women We’re Going
After the Denim
So Much Water So Close to Home
The Third Thing That Killed My Father Off
A Serious Talk
The Calm
Popular Mechanics
Everything Stuck to Him
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
One More Thing

Stories from Fires
The Lie
The Cabin
Harry’s Death
The Pheasant

Cathedral
Feathers
Chef’s House
Preservation
The Compartment
A Small, Good Thing
Vitamins
Careful
Where I’m Calling From
The Train
Fever
The Bridle
Cathedral

From Where I’m Calling From
Boxes
Whoever Was Using This Bed
Intimacy
Menudo
Elephant
Blackbird Pie
Errand

Other Fiction
The Hair
The Aficionados
Poseidon and Company
Bright Red Apples
From The Augustine Notebooks
Kindling
What Would You Like to See?
Dreams
Vandals
Call If You Need Me

Selected Essays
My Father’s Life
On Writing
Fires
Author’s Note to Where I’m Calling From

Beginners (The Manuscript Version of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love)
Why Don’t You Dance?
Viewfinder
Where Is Everyone?
Gazebo
Want to See Something?
The Fling
A Small, Good Thing
Tell the Women We’re Going
If It Please You
So Much Water So Close to Home
Dummy
Pie
The Calm
Mine
Distance
Beginners
One More Thing

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-046-9 1019 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

N° 195 Library of America Series

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