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List Price: $14.00Amazon.com's Price: $10.08 You Save: $3.92 (28%)as of 12/23/2009 10:43 EST
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780679723059
ISBN: 0679723056
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 176
Publication Date: June 18, 1989
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date: June 18, 1989
Studio: Vintage
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Editorial Review:
Amazon.com Review:
"What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" is not only the most well-known short story title of the latter part of the 20th century; it has come to stand for an entire aesthetic, the bare-bones prose style for which Raymond Carver became famous. Perhaps, it could be argued, too famous, at least for his fiction's own good. Like those of Hemingway or any other writer similarly loved, imitated, parodied, and reviled, these stories can sometimes produce the sense of reading pastiche. "A man without hands came to the door to sell me a photograph of my house." "That morning she pours Teacher's over my belly and licks it off. That afternoon she tries to jump out the window." "My friend Mel McGinnis was talking. Mel is a cardiologist, and sometimes that gives him the right." What other writer ever produced first sentences like these? They are like doors into Carverworld, where everyone speaks in simple declarative phrases, no one ever stops at one beer, and failure or violence are the true outcomes of the American dream.
Yet these stories bear careful re-reading, like any truly important and enduring work. For one thing, Carver is one of the few writers who can make desperation--cutting your ex-wife's telephone cord in the middle of a conversation, standing on your own roof chunking rocks while a man with no hands takes your picture--deeply funny. Then there is the sheer craft that went into their creation. Despite their seeming simplicity, his tales are as artfully constructed as poems--and like poems, the best of them can make your breath catch in your throat. In the title piece, for instance, after the gin has been drunk, after the stories have been told, after the tensions in the room have come to the surface and subsided again, there comes a moment of strange lightness and peace: "I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone's heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark."
Much of what happens in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981) happens offstage, and we're left with tragedy's props: booze, instant coffee, furniture from a failed marriage, cigarettes smoked in the middle of the night. This is not merely a matter of technique. Carver leaves out a great deal, but that's only a measure of his characters' vulnerability, the nerve endings his stories lay bare. To say anything more, one feels, would simply hurt too much. --Mary Park
Product Description:
In his second collection of stories, as in his first, Carver's characters are peripheral people--people without education, insight or prospects, people too unimaginative to even give up. Carver celebrates these men and women.
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
If you're the type of person that needs action, suspense and a constantly moving story line, these stories aren't for you. But if you like to read stories that mimic life, have real conversations and aren't pure fantasy, than this is the book for you. Carver writes in a purely real way. His conversations are just as mundane as the one you had this morning. It's not rehearsed and rewritten 50 times like Hollywood. People say the wrong things and do what they shouldn't have done, and have to take ... Read More
Rating: -
Carver was a master of the really short short story, little glimpses of life that pass you by with the merest brush on the shoulder, leaving you with a shiver, a tear, or occasionally a smile. Few of the seventeen stories in this magnificent collection have a normal beginning or end; rather they are moments when a life, a relationship, comes briefly into focus, sometimes around a trivial event that nonetheless illuminates everything before and after it. When things happen, they are for the most part ... Read More
Rating: -
Again, I might well be arriving late to the party, and maybe the food might all be gone, but I still feel it worth attending and seeing if I can't find something.
I found Carver via Murakami's 'Birthday Stories', where, having been impressed by 'The Bath', I decided to dig further and seek other works. Now, having read 'What we talk about...' I can only say three things;
i) Brilliant! Carver is a literary genius who occupies rare ground,
ii) Original. He re-wrote the short-story, ... Read More
Rating: -
Raymond Carver is a master of the short story, and this book features a lot of his early raw talent. Make sure you also read "Short Cuts," which has some of the same stories in it, but it has the unedited versions. "What We Talk About..." features work when Ray was still working with his often too critical editor.
Rating:  -
The stoic, bare prose of Raymond Carver's short fiction bears the stamp of a true craftsman, as well as an artist who knows the meaning of pain. These stories are a remarkable aesthetic accomplishment, one of the best collections of the period; they are both simple and intriguing in their cool and stark economy of form. Like Hemingway, Carver had the gift of creating a world through brief and beautiful glimpses. Never does he insert any clunky ideology or literary affectations. These stories are elegant, ... Read More
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Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780679723059
ISBN: 0679723056
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 176
Publication Date: June 18, 1989
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date: June 18, 1989
Studio: Vintage