Books by Raymond Carver
Beginners: The Original Version of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (Vintage Contemporaries)
From “one of the great short story writers of our time—of any time” (The Philadelphia Inquirer)—comes the original manuscript of the seminal 1981 collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.
Raymond Carver is one of the most celebrated short-story writers in American literature—his style is both instantly recognizable and hugely influential—and the pieces in What We Talk About…, which portray the gritty loves and lives of the American working class, are counted among the foundation stones of the contemporary short story. In this unedited text, we gain insight into the process of a great writer. These expansive stories illuminate the many dimensions of Carver’s style, and are indispensable to our understanding of his legacy.
Text established by William L. Stull and Maureen P. Carroll
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All of Us: The Collected Poems
A rich collection of poems from not only “one of the great short story writers of our time” (The Philadelphia Inquirer), but one of America’s most large-hearted and affecting poets.
Like Raymond 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.
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Ultramarine: Poems
"Carver's gifts as a storyteller shine through his poetry" (Los Angeles Times) in this collection that moves from the beauty of the world to thoughts of mortality and family and art.
One of Raymond Carver’s final collections of poetry, this collection “has the astonished, chastened voice of a person who has survived a wreck, as surprised that he had a life before it as that he has one afterward, willing to remember both sides” (The New York Times Book Review).
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American Short Story Masterpieces: A Rich Selection of Recent Fiction from America's Best Modern Writers
This highly acclaimed collection of short stories by American writers contains only the best literary art of the past four decades.
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.
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Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories
The final story collection from “one of the great short story writers of our time” (The Philadelphia Inquirer) features classic stories from Cathedral, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, and earlier volumes. • “Among the masterpieces of American fiction." —The New York Times Book Review
By the time of his early death in 1988, Raymond Carver had established himself as one of the great practitioners of the American short story, a writer who had not only found his own voice but imprinted it in the imaginations of thousands of readers. Where I’m Calling From, his last collection, includes seven new works previously unpublished in book form. Together, these 37 stories give us a superb overview of Carver’s life work and show us why he was so widely imitated but never equaled.
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What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: Stories
The most celebrated story collection from “one of the true American masters” (The New York Review of Books)—a haunting meditation on love, loss, and companionship, and finding one’s way through the dark that includes the iconic and much-referenced title story featured in the Academy Award-winning film Birdman.
"Raymond Carver's America is ... clouded by pain and the loss of dreams, but it is not as fragile as it looks. It is a place of survivors and a place of stories.... [Carver] has done what many of the most gifted writers fail to do: He has invented a country of his own, like no other except that very world, as Wordsworth said, which is the world to all of us." —The New York Times Book Review
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Cathedral
by Nelson DeMille, Raymond Carver, Ben Hopkins
St. Patrick's Day, New York City. Everyone is celebrating, but everyone is in for the shock of his life. Born into the heat and hatred of the Northern Ireland conflict, IRA man Brian Flynn has masterminded a brilliant terrorist act -- the seizure of Saint Patrick's Cathedral. Among his hostages: the woman Brian Flynn once loved, a former terrorist turned peace activist. Among his enemies: an Irish-American police lieutenant fighting against a traitor inside his own ranks and a shadowy British intelligence officer pursuing his own cynical, bloody plan. The cops face a booby-trapped, perfectly laid out killing zone inside the church. The hostages face death. Flynn faces his own demons, in an electrifying duel of nerves, honor, and betrayal....
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Cathedral
by Nelson DeMille, Raymond Carver, Ben Hopkins
Raymond Carver’s third collection of stories, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, including the canonical titular story about blindness and learning to enter the very different world of another. These twelve stories mark a turning point in Carver’s work and “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).
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Cathedral
by Nelson DeMille, Raymond Carver, Ben Hopkins
A thoroughly immersive read and a remarkable feat of imagination, Cathedral tells a sweeping story about obsession, mysticism, art, and earthly desire in gripping prose. It deftly combines historical fiction and a tale of adventure and intrigue.
At the center of this story is the Cathedral. Its design and construction in the 13th and 14th centuries in the Rhineland town of Hagenburg unites a vast array of unforgettable characters whose fortunes are inseparable from the shifting political factions and economic interests vying for supremacy. From the bishop to his treasurer to local merchants and lowly stonecutters, everyone, even the town’s Jewish denizens, is implicated and affected by the slow rise of Hagenburg’s Cathedral, which in no way enforces morality or charity. Around this narrative center, Ben Hopkins has constructed his own monumental edifice, a novel that is rich with the vicissitudes of mercantilism, politics, religion, and human enterprise.
Fans of Umberto Eco, Hilary Mantel, and Ken Follett will delight at the atmosphere, the beautiful prose, and the vivid characters of Ben Hopkins’s Cathedral.
“Cathedral is a brilliantly organised mess of great, great characters. It is fascinating, fun, and gripping to the very end.”—Roddy Doyle, Booker Prize-winning author of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha
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Cathedral
by Nelson DeMille, Raymond Carver, Ben Hopkins
A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS CHOICE
“An expansive fictional epic addressing themes of art, religion and power in the mode of Ken Follett or Umberto Eco... Hopkins’s compelling and descriptive tale will leave readers eager for more.”—Shelf Awareness (Starred Review)
The Cathedral. A grandiose edifice seemingly with a life of its own in the center of the medieval Rhineland town of Hagenburg. It will decide the fortunes of men and women, and fill wide-eyed children with dreams that are as extravagant as its own awe-inspiring form. Over almost two centuries, the Cathedral’s design and construction unites a vast array of unforgettable characters whose destinies are inseparable from the shifting political factions and economic interests vying for supremacy. Immersive, atmospheric, entertaining, Cathedral tells a sweeping story about obsession, mysticism, art, and earthly desire, combining historical fiction with a gripping tale of adventure and intrigue.
“Hopkins weaves together a multitude of voices to examine the relationship between medieval worship and the era’s politics and economics. The resulting epic is both sweeping and human.”—The New Yorker
“A clever (even postmodern?) commentary on the ironies of history.”—Alida Becker, The New York Times Book Review
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Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?: Stories
The first collection of stories from “one of the great short story writers of our time” (The Philadelphia Inquirer) breathed new life into the American short story, showing us the humor and tragedy that dwell in the hearts of ordinary people.
"[Carver's stories] can ... be counted among the masterpieces of American Literature." —The New York Times Book Review
"One of the great short story writers of our time—of any time." —The Philadelhpia Inquirer
"The whole collection is a knock out. Few writers can match Raymond Carver's entwining style and language." —The Dallas Morning News
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Short Cuts: Selected Stories
From “one of the great short story writers of our time” (The Philadelphia Inquirer)—nine stories and a poem that offer a searing portrait of American innocence and loss—and formed the basis for the film “Short Cuts” directed by Robert Altman.
With deadpan humor and enormous tenderness, this is the work of “one of the true contemporary masters” (The New York Review of Books).
Features stories from the collections Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, Where I’m Calling From, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, and A New Path to the Waterfall; including an introduction by Robert Altman.
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A New Path to the Waterfall
Raymond Carver, author of Where I'm Calling From, is widely considered one of the great short story writers of our time. A New Path to the Waterfallwas Carver's last book, and shows a writer telling the truth as best as he knows how in the time left to him. The sixty-odd poems in this collection are linked by Carver with selections from other writers, most notably Chekhov, whose work was an inspiration and a guide, and by the cumulative force of the life and death questions he poses in them. As Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet guided countless readers discovering their true love and work, Carver's book will guide those in the process of celebrating a limited life and mourning the inescapable end of it. A New Path to the Waterfall is an essential book for those who admire Carver's work, and testament to the transcendent strength of the human spirit. In her introductory essay, Tess Gallagher, Carver's companion and fellow writer, lays out the circumstances of their last years together with matter-of-fact grace. As Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet guided countless readers discovering their true love and work, Carver's book will guide those in the process of celebrating a limited life and mourning the inescapable end of it. A New Path to the Waterfall is an essential book for those who admire Carver's work, and testament to the transcendent strength of the human spirit. In her introductory essay, Tess Gallagher, Carver's companion and fellow writer, lays out the circumstances of their last years together with matter-of-fact grace.
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Raymond Carver: Collected Stories (LOA #195): Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? / What We Talk About When We Talk About Love / Cathedral / stories ... / other stories (Library of America)
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.
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Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories
From “one of the great short story writers of our time—of any time” (The Philadelphia Inquirer)—comes more than sixty stories, poems, and essays, including two early versions from the seminal collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.
"Show[s] the enormous talent of Raymond Carver beginning to take hold." —San Francisco Chronicle
A wide-ranging collection by the extravagantly versatile Raymond Carver. Two of the stories that were later significantly revised in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love appear here in their original form, revealing clearly the astounding process of Carver’s literary development.
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Carver Country The World of Raymond Carver
Carver Country is a new updated edition of a 1990 classic. Adelman's evocative duotone photographs of the landscape and people of Carver's life in Washington, Oregon, California, and New York state are paired with selections from Carver's poems, stories, and letters. This "visual biography" reveals that the great depth and melancholy Carver manifested in his character's lives was often directly born out of the surrounding world and his inner demons. What results becomes a profound meditation on the intersection of the fictionalized world and the physical world.
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