Kirjahaku

In collections such as Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Raymond 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 relation between writer and editor, Beginners expands our sense of Carver and is essential reading for anyone who cares about his achievement. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

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.

Raymond Carver said it was possible 'to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language and endow these things - a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring - with immense, even startling power'.

With this, his first collection, Carver breathed new life into the short story.

Among them is one of his longest, 'Errand', in which he imagines the death of Chekhov, a writer Carver hugely admired and to whose work his own was often compared. This fine story suggests that the greatest of modern short-story writers may, in the year before his untimely death, have been flexing his muscles for a longer work.

Fires is the best introduction to the full range and humanity of Carver's writing. It contains four essays, including a moving memoir od his father's working life in the saw-mills of the Pacific Northwest, a tribute to his mentor John Gardner, and the title essay about the influences on his writing life;

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is Carver's most famous collection of short stories and remians one of the most influential pieces of modern literature to date.

From "one of the great short story writers of our time--of any time" (The Philadelphia Inquirer)--comes the original manuscript of the seminal 1981 collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Raymond Carver is one of the most celebrated short-story writers in American literature--his style is both instantly recognizable and hugely influential--and the pieces in What We Talk About..., which portray the gritty loves and lives of the American working class, are counted among the foundation stones of the contemporary short story. In this unedited text, we gain insight into the process of a great writer. These expansive stories illuminate the many dimensions of Carver's style, and are indispensable to our understanding of his legacy. Text established by William L. Stull and Maureen P. Carroll

This prodigiously rich collection suggests that Raymond Carver was not only America's finest writer of short fiction, but also one of its most large-hearted and affecting poets. Like Carver's stories, the more than 300 poems in All of Us are marked by a keen attention to the physical world; an uncanny ability to compress vast feeling into discreet moments; a voice of conversational intimacy, and an unstinting sympathy. This complete edition brings together all the poems of Carver's five previous books, from Fires to the posthumously published No Heroics, Please. It also contains bibliographical and textual notes on individual poems; a chronology of Carver's life and work; and a moving introduction by Carver's widow, the poet Tess Gallagher.

Raymond Carver's complete uncollected fiction and nonfiction, including the five posthumously discovered "last" stories, found a decade after Carver's death and published here in book form for the first time. Call If You Need Me includes all of the prose previously collected in No Heroics, Please, four essays from Fires, and those five marvelous stories that range over the period of Carver's mature writing and give his devoted readers a final glimpse of the great writer at work. The pure pleasure of Carver's writing is everywhere in his work, here no less than in those stories that have already entered the canon of modern literature.

A vast collection of poems which won "Poetry" magazine's Levinson prize."Somehow the nuances of daily experience, the warmth, humor, and reflection the poet brings to subjects are quite unlike anyone else's." - J.Parisi "Over the years, Raymond Carver has been writing poetry alongside his fiction -- same of his earlier verse appeared in a recent anthology titled Fires -- and the most vigorous poems in this new collection function as distilled, heightened versions of his stories, offering us fugitive glimpses of ordinary lives on the edge." -- Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times"Carver's voice is direct, his themes universal."-- The Seattle Past-Intelligencer"The emotional impact of his scenes and slices of life is imparted without strain; the voice speaks: with such an uncanny directness and ease -- and remarkable intimacy -- that the reader may wander at poem's end how such simplicity can carry such power...Somehow the nuances of daily experience, the warmth, humor, and reflection the poet brings to his subject are quite unlike anyone else's, bath in his immediacy and in the ability to make us identify and be moved. A splendid book."-- Joseph Parisi, Booklist"The stories poems tell are so wonderfully self-contained, so self-evident, so gracefully metaphorical." -- The Village Voice"There is a severity of language, an understatement of emotion, that endows the poem of his first major collection with the feel of extraordinary experience. To read them is to have the sense this man has l lived more than most of us. We trust him because of the plainly conversational diction and the lapel-grabbing rhythms....They are very moving, very memorable."-- Dave Smith, Poetry

Spans twenty-five years of the author's writing career with both earlier works and original stories that explore betrayal, madness, and other reaches of human experience, in tales including "Intimacy" and "Boxes"

"You should read Fires now. These stories and poems...show the enormous talent of Raymond Carver beginning to take hold."-- San Francisco Chronicle"Seminal in Carver studies...A disparate collection of work bound by a unity of vision and obsession."-- Los Angeles Herald Examiner"Carver's most revealing book...This collection confirms the worth of Raymond Carver's work...Like bright birds in distant trees, Carver's stories appear in flashes, glimpses; Fires reveals the arc of his purposeful flight."-- Boston Globe

The most celebrated story collection from "one of the true American masters" (The New York Review of Books)--a haunting meditation on love, loss, and companionship, and finding one's way through the dark that includes the iconic and much-referenced title story featured in the Academy Award-winning film Birdman. "Raymond Carver's America is ... clouded by pain and the loss of dreams, but it is not as fragile as it looks. It is a place of survivors and a place of stories.... Carver] has done what many of the most gifted writers fail to do: He has invented a country of his own, like no other except that very world, as Wordsworth said, which is the world to all of us." --The New York Times Book Review

"A dozen stories that overflow with the danger, excitement, mystery and possibility of life...Carver is a writer of astonishing compassion and honesty...his eye set only on describing and revealing the world as he sees it. His eye is so clear, it almost breaks your heart."--Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World"Cathedral contains astonishing achievements, which bespeaks a writer expanding his range of intentions."--The Boston Globe"A few of Mr. Carver's stories can already be counted among the masterpieces of American fiction...Cathedral shows a gifted writer struggling for a larger scope of reference, a finer touch of nuance." --Irving Howe, front page, The New York Times Book Review"Clear, hard language so right that we shiver at the knowledge we gain from it." --Thomas Williams, Chicago Tribune Book World"Carver is more than a realist; there is, in some of his stories, a strangeness, the husk of a myth." --Los Angeles TimesStories included: "Feathers" "Chef's House" "Preservation" "The Compartment" "A Small, Good Thing" "Vitamins" "Careful" "Where I'm Calling From" "The Train" "Fever" "The Bridle" "Cathedral"

With this, his first collection of stories, Raymond Carver breathed new life into the American short story. Carver shows us the humor and tragedy that dwell in the hearts of ordinary people; his stories are the classics of our time. " Carver's stories] can ... be counted among the masterpieces of American Literature." --The New York Times Book Review "One of the great short story writers of our time--of any time." --The Philadelhpia Inquirer "The whole collection is a knock out. Few wriers can match Raymond Carver's entiwining style and language." --The Dallas Morning News

From "one of the great short story writers of our time" (The Philadelphia Inquirer)--nine stories and a poem that offer a searing portrait of American innocence and loss--and formed the basis for the film "Short Cuts" directed by Robert Altman. With deadpan humor and enormous tenderness, this is the work of "one of the true contemporary masters" (The New York Review of Books). Features stories from the collections Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, Where I'm Calling From, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, and A New Path to the Waterfall; including an introduction by Robert Altman.

Poems deal with memories, loss of identity, childhood innocence, the past, and mortality.

Shortly before he died, America's laureate of the dispossessed made his own selection from his short stories. This edition includes a selection from the full range of the author's work including, Furious Seasons, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, What We Talk about When We Talk about Love, and Cathedral, and seven stories from, Elephant.

'I look at all of Carver's work as just one story, for his stories are all occurences, all about things that just happen to people and cause their lives to take a turn...