What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

By (author) Carver, Raymond
Short description/annotation:
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.
Description:

The unparalleled short story collection by the great Raymond Carver, master of spare, powerful prose and one of the great American short story writers.

This powerful collection of stories is set in the mid-West among the lonely men and women who drink, fish and play cards to ease the passing of time. In the opening story a man whose wife and children have left him, rearranges all his furniture on the lawn. And in each subsequent story sadness, pain and drudgery propel the characters towards their fate. But through the darkness, vivid colloquial narration and a razor-sharp sense of how people really communicate illuminate all the comedy and tragedy of ordinary life.

‘The master craftsman of the modern American short story’ Daily Telegraph

‘One of America''s most original, truest voices’ Salman Rushdie

''The most celebrated story collection from one of the true American masters'' New York Review of Books

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The master craftsman of the modern American short story
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One of America''s most original, truest voices
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One of the most celebrated American short-story writers of the 20th century
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A remarkable collection
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I remember being floored by the first Raymond Carver collection I read: What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
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Raymond Carver''s stories can now be counted amongst the masterpieces of American fiction
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These brilliant shards - some no more than three or four pages long - confirm Carver''s place in the hall of America''s great writers and suggest that, with his hero Chekhov, he was one of the world''s masters of the short story
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Raymond Carver uses the English language like a whittler''s knife, carving stark and unadorned prose-objects, paring away everything but the very core of human emotion
Biographical note:
Raymond Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, in 1938. His father was a saw-mill worker and his mother was a waitress and clerk. He married early and for years writing had to come second to earning a living for his young family. Despite, small-press publication, it was not until Will You Please Be Quiet Please? appeared in 1976 that his work began to reach a wider audience. This was the year in which he gave up alcohol, which had contributed to the collapse of his marriage. In 1977 he met the writer Tess Gallagher, with whom he shared the last eleven years of his life. During this prolific period he wrote three collections of stories, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Cathedral and Elephant. Fires, a collection of essays, poems and stories, appeared in 1985, followed by three further collections of poetry. In 1988 he completed the poetry collection A New Path to the Waterfall.
Promotional headline:
The short story that inspired the play at the heart of BIRDMAN starring Michael Keaton, Ed Norton and Emma Stone