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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. 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.
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Fires (Paperback)
Raymond Carver
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R266
R130
Discovery Miles 1 300
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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; fifty poems, many
of them not collected elsewhere; and seven stories, including three
from the early collection Furious Seasons.
A major collection of Carver's short stories, including seven new stories written shortly before the author's death in 1988.
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.
What will you get for your birthday this year? A chance to see into
the future? Or a reminder of the imperfect past? In this enviable
gathering, Haruki Murakami has chosen for his party some of the
very best short story writers of recent years, each with their own
birthday experiences, each story a snapshot of life on a single
day. Including stories by Russell Banks, Ethan Canin, Raymond
Carver, David Foster Wallace, Denis Johnson, Claire Keegan, Andrea
Lee, Daniel Lyons, Lewis Robinson, Lynda Sexson, Paul Theroux,
William Trevor and Haruki Murakami, this anthology captures a range
of emotions evoked by advancing age and the passing of time, from
events fondly recalled to the impact of appalling tragedy.
Previously published in a Japanese translation by Haruki Murakami,
this English edition contains a specially written introduction.
Shortly before he died, America's laureate of the dispossessed made his own choice of his short stories, revised the texts and published them in this authoritative edition. The stories in Where I'm Calling From are selected 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 include all seven stories from his last collection, Elephant.
"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 Times
Stories 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"
A movie tie-in edition to the brilliant new film by Robert Altman, based on these nine stories by Carver, "one of the great short story writers of our time--of any time" (Philadelphia Inquirer).
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Cathedral (Paperback)
Raymond Carver
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R294
R239
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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'. Nowhere is
this alchemy more striking than in the title story of Cathedral in
which a blind man guides the hand of a sighted man as together they
draw the cathedral the blind man can never see. Many view this
story, and indeed this collection, as a watershed in the maturing
of Carver's work to a more confidently poetic style.
'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... In formulating the mosaic of
the film Short Cuts, which is based on these nine stories and a
poem, 'Lemonade', I've tried to do the same thing- to give the
audience one look... But it all began here. I was a reader turning
these pages. Trying on these lives' - Robert Altman in his
introduction.
This highly Acclaimed collection of short stories by American
writers contains only the best literary art of the past four
decades. With a bias toward realism editors Raymond Carver and Tom
Jenks have selected fiction that "tells a story"-and tells it with
a masterful handling of language, situation, and insight.
But what is so special about this volume is that it mirrors our
age, our concerns, and our lives. Whether it's the end of a
marriage, as in Bobbie Ann Manson's ""Shiloh,"" or the struggle
with self-esteem and weight in Andre Dubus's" "The Fat Girl,"" the
36 works included her probe issues that give us that "shock of
recognition" that is the hallmark of great art--wonderful,
absorbing fiction that will be read and reread for decades to come.
"Carver's poetry is like an almost invisible strand of fishing line reeling us all together, connecting us by the heart." --San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle
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.
With this, his first collection, Carver breathed new life into the
short story. In the pared-down style that has since become his
hallmark, Carver showed how humour and tragedy dwell in the hearts
of ordinary people, and won a readership that grew with every
subsequent brilliant collection of stories, poems and essays that
appeared in the last eleven years of his life.
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Elephant (Paperback)
Raymond Carver
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R233
R188
Discovery Miles 1 880
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These seven stories were the last that Carver wrote. 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.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI & RAYMOND CARVER Charles Bukowski and Raymond
Carver were credited as the fathers of the "Dirty Realism" genre in
the 1980s branching out from minimalism, the stripping of fiction
down to the least amount of words and a concentration on the
subject's view of the object. The characters are usually
run-of-the-mill, every day people the lower and middle class
worker, the unemployed, the alcoholic, the beaten-down-by-life. In
this experimental monograph (in the vein of D. H. Lawrence's
Studies in Contemporary American Fiction), avante/pop literary
critic Michael Hemmingson examines these dirty works of Bukowski
and Carver through the lens of late twentieth-century American
culture and the sociological observation of the self, questioning
the authority of the "I" in fiction and poetry and its relation to
the eye's gaze of the words on a page. Hemmingson offers close
readings of selected texts, deconstructing iconic works by Bukowski
and Carver to point out the elements of dirty realism and mastery
of the language of the common folk, proving that these two writers
are an institution in American literature. MICHAEL HEMMINGSON has
written over 25 books of literary, western, SF, horror, noir,
autobiography, erotica, narrative journalism, gonzo journalism,
cultural anthropology, critical theory, critifiction, and
ethnography. He lives and works in Southern California.
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Beginners (Paperback)
Raymond Carver
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R294
R239
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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. But the original, unedited
manuscript, Beginners - published here for the first time, was
almost fifty per cent longer than the published collection. This
restored version of Carver's stories reveals what was previously
unsaid, filling in the narrative silences that have both inspired
and mystified readers for so long. Beginners is a fascinating
insight into the aesthetic of a literary great and, in the
questions it raises, may just spark off one of the great cultural
debates of our times.
Raymond Carver always thought of himself, first and foremost, as a poet. As he pointed out himself, he began as a poet and his first published work was a poem. This collected edition of his poems brings together, in the order of the first American publication, the poems of Fires (1985), Where Water Comes together with Other Water (1986), Ultramarine (1988), A New Path to the Waterfall (1989) and No Heroics, Please (1991). The text is edited by Professor William L. Stull of the University of Hartford, with notes and significant variorum readings, and is introduced by Raymond Carver’s widow, Tess Gallagher. Like his stories, Carver’s poems are spare and compressed, making use of everyday language with a moving simplicity and directness that seem easy to achieve but are the result of careful craftsmanship. This Collected Poems is an essential volume for any admirer of Carver and his writings.
A VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES ORIGINAL
A literary event: Raymond Carver's complete uncollected fiction and nonfiction, including the recently 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 alreadey entered the canon of modern literature.
"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
A new collection containing previously unpublished stories that show Carver at the peak of his powers as a contemporary master of American fiction. When he died in August 1988, Raymond Carver had just published what were thought to be his last stories in his own selection, Where I'm Calling From. This new volume brings together all of his uncollected fiction, including three late stories only recently discovered in his house in Port Angeles, a fragment of a novel, five early stories, and all of his non-fiction prose, including his last essay "Friendship", about a London reunion with Richard Ford and Tobias Wolff. The five "new" stories are wonderful examples of his late open style, while the non-fiction prose includes all of the essays, together with occasional commentary on his own fiction and poetry, writings on the American short story, and reviews of work by his contemporaries, including Donald Barthelme, Richard Brautigan, Jim Harrison, Thomas McGuane and Richard Ford. Call if you Need Me: The Uncollected Writings takes us into Carver's workshop, and completes the picture of one of the most original writers of his generation in the English language.
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Beginners (Paperback)
Raymond Carver
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R509
R449
Discovery Miles 4 490
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