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.
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