Raymond Carver

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.

What We Talk about when We Talk about Love

Di cosa parliamo quando parliamo d'amore

The Stories of Raymond Carver

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.

Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

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.

And Other Stories

Elephant

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.

Cathedral

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.

Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? / What We Talk About When We Talk About Love / Cathedral / stories from Where I'm Calling From / Beginners / other stories

Raymond Carver: Collected Stories (LOA #195)

Poems exploring the experiences of the author are accompanied by essays on writing and a selection of short stories

Essays, Poems, Stories

Fires

The Collected Poems

All of Us

Cattedrale

The Selected Stories

Where I'm Calling from

Il mestiere di scrivere

Los deslumbrados lectores de Catedral, primer libro publicado en Espaa de Carver, reencontrarn en De qu hablamos cuando hablamos de amor la atmsfera y los personajes de un autor que domin indiscutiblemente el panorama literario norteamericano de los aos 80.Parejas que se despedazan, compaeros que parten desesperadamente a la aventura, hijos que intentan comunicarse con sus padres, un universo injusto, violento, tenso, a veces irrisorio... En palabras de Roberto Fernndez Sastre, Carver no designa lo intolerable, sino que lo nombra. Sin concesiones hacia nada ni hacia nadie, rescata lo real en su esencialidad amorfa y brutal.La narrativa de Carver es tan escueta que toma un tiempo darse cuenta de hasta qu punto la totalidad de una cultura y de una condicin moral est representada incluso por el bosquejo aparentemente ms tenue. Este segundo volumen de relatos es claramente la obra de un maestro en su apogeo (Frank Kermode).

De qué hablamos cuando hablamos de amor

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

Poems

A New Path to the Waterfall

Tom Jenks

This collection of thirty-six classic short stories from the fifties to the eighties features works by authors such as James Baldwin, Barry Hannah, Bernard Halamud, Flannery O'Connor, Philip Roth, Anne Beattie, and Tobias Wolff

American Short Story Masterpieces

En Quieres hacer el favor de callarte, por favor?, su primer libro de relatos, que escribi y reescribi a lo largo de quince aos y que le supuso la consagracin inmediata, Raymond Carver renov la forma del relato breve hasta darle proporciones de hai ku y sin que esta utilizacin radical de la elipsis le haga perder ninguna fuerza. Todo lo contrario, los relatos de Carver poseen, quiz precisamente por su mismo carcter fragmentario, una inesperada capacidad de provocar una impresin fortsima, una indeleble conmocin.Los dramas aparentemente ms triviales, las catstrofes silenciosas de la gente ms comn: tal es el territorio en el que se mueven siempre los inquietantes relatos de Carver, el maestro indiscutible del cuento norteamericano actual (Michel Bradeau, Le Monde).Los relatos de Raymond Carver son extraordinarios por su lenguaje, por su msica y por su tremenda y aterradora visin de la vida corriente norteamericana. Carver se encuentra entre los escritores ms autnticamente americanos de hoy en da (Leonard Michaels).

¿Quieres hacer el favor de callarte, por favor?

Benito Gómez Ibáñez

Se ha afirmado que el relato es la forma narrativa por excelencia en la literatura norteamericana actual y que Raymond Carver es el maestro indiscutible de este registro. Sus personajes son gente de lo más comun: trabajadores manuales, empleaduchos, parad

Raymond Carver

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