A collection of short stories giving an insight in to small town America and the American psyche. A great read for those short train journeys or a few spare moments to treat yourself.
June 2010 Guest Editor Patrick Gale on Raymond Carver...
Carver’s stories took the form Chekhov perfected and reinvented it for the television era. Pithy, funny and desperately bleak evocations of everyday life in suburban hell, they’re written in a prose so finely balanced as to take on the quality of poetry; shiny and well-made as a 1958 Frigidaire.
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love Synopsis
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.
Raymond Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, in 1938. His first short stories appeared in Esquire during Gordon Lish’s tenure as fiction editor in the 1970s. Carver’s work began to reach a wider audience with the 1976 publication of Will You Please be Quiet, Please, but it was not until the 1981 publication of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love under Gordon Lish, then at Knopf, that he began to achieve real literary fame. This collection was edited by more than 40 per cent before publication, and Carver dedicated it to his fellow writer and future wife, Tess Gallagher, with the promise that he would one day republish his stories at full length. He went on to write two more collections of stories, Cathedral and Elephant, which moved away from the earlier minimalist style into a new expansiveness, as well as several collections of poetry. He died in 1988, aged fifty.
