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List Price: $40.00Amazon.com's Price: $26.40 You Save: $13.60 (34%)as of 11/22/2009 06:00 EST
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9781598530469
ISBN: 1598530461
Label: Library of America
Manufacturer: Library of America
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 960
Publication Date: August 20, 2009
Publisher: Library of America
Studio: Library of America
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Product Description:
Raymond Carver's spare dramas of loneliness, despair, and troubled relationships breathed new life into the American short story of the 1970s and '80s. In collections such as Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, 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.
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
It was interesting to be able to read different versions of the same stories. It was eye-opening to see how much some of Carver's stories had been cut by Gordon Lish, his editor. It was also interesting to read some of the essays, which I had not read before. The essays also served as a means to catch a breath from the stories. It was wonderful to have them included, as they revealed another dimension of Carver's insight and talent.
On the other hand, the very completeness and sheer ... Read More
Rating:  -
Collected Stories of Raymond Carver is the comprehensive book for all readers of Carver, not to mention any lover of short stories. This collection encompasses his entire career, from his early days to those stories published after his death, and all are excellent in depth and nature. Reading this book is a journey into the heart and soul of Raymond Carver, and this will be a collection for the ages.
Rating: -
Raymond Carver managed to capture, in his short stories, the power in the mundane: the extraordinary circumstances hidden within the subtleties of reality. COLLECTED STORIES showcases his immense talent. It collects his three volumes of fiction: "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?", "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love," and "Cathedral," as well as the miscellaneous stories not gathered in those three volumes. The collection even offers an "alternate" version of the "What We Talk About" collection: ... Read More
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Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9781598530469
ISBN: 1598530461
Label: Library of America
Manufacturer: Library of America
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 960
Publication Date: August 20, 2009
Publisher: Library of America
Studio: Library of America