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.
