First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

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.

Before World War I, Southern women's participation in the workforce consisted of black women's domestic labor and white working-class women's industrial or manufacturing work, but after the war, Southern women flooded business offices as stenographers, typists, clerks, and bookkeepers. This book examines their experiences in the clerical workforce, using both traditional labor sources and exploring the cultural institutions that evolved from these women's work-related milieu.
Businessmen throughout the South molded this workforce to meet their needs using both labor-saving management techniques and exploiting social mores to enforce gender boundaries that limited women's workplace opportunities. This study traces the social and economic implications of Southern women's increased participation in clerical labor after World War I. While it increased the civic activities of white middle-class southern women, it also confined them to a routinized days work and limited venues of occupational achievement. Through a varied network of business women's clubs and organizations, women struggled with their new identities as workers and attempted to integrate their work lives with their community and family obligations.
(Ph.D. dissertation, Emory University, 1995; revised with new Introduction and Preface)

The two German provinces of the Roman Empire, Germania Superior and Germania Inferior, which included modern Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and parts of France and Belgium, formed a vital link between the Mediterranean and the North Sea. Maureen Carroll's synthesis of past and recent archaeological research introduces readers to the main features of the Roman Empire in these provinces. It deals with the pre-Roman societies and their landscapes, which were to be changed by the Romans after the conquests of Caesar and Augustus. The book also explores the concept of frontier and assesses the role of the German provinces as border zones of the Empire.