Raymond Carver Books In Order

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

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 1980’s.

Fires

‘You should read Fires now. These stories and poems…
show the enormous talent of Raymond Carver beginning to take hold.’

San Francisco Chronicle

‘Seminal in Carver studies…
A disparate collection of work bound by a unity of vision and obsession.’

Los Angeles Herald Examiner

‘Carver’s most revealing book…
This collection confirms the worth of Raymond Carver’s work…
Like bright birds in distant trees, Carver’s stories appear in flashes, glimpses; Fires reveals the arc of his purposeful flight.’

Boston Globe

Cathedral

‘A dozen stories that 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’Cathedral contains astonishing achievements, which bespeaks a writer expanding his range of intentions.’ The Boston Globe’A few of Mr. Carver’s stories can already be counted among the masterpieces of American fiction…
Cathedral shows a gifted writer struggling for a larger scope of reference, a finer touch of nuance.’ Irving Howe, front page, The New York Times Book Review’Clear, hard language so right that we shiver at the knowledge we gain from it.’ Thomas Williams, Chicago Tribune Book World’Carver is more than a realist; there is, in some of his stories, a strangeness, the husk of a myth.’ Los Angeles TimesStories included: ‘Feathers’ ‘Chef’s House’ ‘Preservation’ ‘The Compartment’ ‘A Small, Good Thing’ ‘Vitamins’ ‘Careful’ ‘Where I’m Calling From’ ‘The Train’ ‘Fever’ ‘The Bridle’ ‘Cathedral‘

Where I’m Calling from

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, encompas*ses classic stories from Cathedral, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, and earlier Carver volumes, along with 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.

Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

With this, his first collection, Carver breathed life into the short story. In the pared down style that has since become his hallmark, Carver showed how humour and tragedy dwell in the hearts of ordinary people, and won a readership that grew with every subsequent brilliant collection of stories, poems and essays that appeared in the last eleven years of his life.

Short Cuts

This collection of Raymond Carver’s interviews reveals him to have been perhaps the premier short story writer of his generation, a lyric narrative poet of singular resonance, and a staunch proponent of realistic fiction in the wake of postmodern formalism. The twenty five conversations gathered here, several available in English for the first time, include craft interviews, biographical portraits, self analyses, and wide ranging reflections on the current literary scene.

Carver discusses his changing views of his widely influential fiction collections What We Talk About When We Talk About Love 1981, Cathedral 1983, and Where I’m Calling From 1988. Carver explains how at the height of his fame as a fiction writer he turned to poetry, producing three prize winning books in as many years. Finally, in the closing months of his life, he talks about the coming of his last triumphant stories, the ones that secured his reputation.

No Heroics, Please

‘A writer of astonishing compassion and honesty.’ Washington Post Book WorldThis volume of previously uncollected work represents the final legacy of one of the great and truly American writers of our time. It includes five of Raymond Carver’s early stories including the first one he ever published, a fragment of an unpublished novel, poems that have previously appeared only in small press editions, and all of his uncollected nonfiction. Included here as well is Carver’s last essay, ‘Friendship’ about a London reunion with Richard Ford and Tobias Wolff. Arranged chronologically, this book affords an intimate and comprehensive thirty year vision of a great writer in the process of becoming himself.’With painful, funny acuteness, Carver captures the electric currents that shoot through people’s lives and singe them indelibly.’ Newsweek’Raymond Carver’s America is a place of survivors and a place of stories. He 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’Carver not only enchants, he convinces.’ Time

Call If You Need Me

When he died in August 1988, Raymond Carver had just published what were thought to be his last stories in the collection entitled Elephant and his own collection of stories, Where I’m Calling from. Five previously unpublished stories have recently been discovered, and this new volume brings together all of his uncollected fiction, including a fragment of an unfinished novel, five early stories, and all of his non fiction prose. Three of these late found stories are fine examples of Carver’s late, open style, while two date from his middle period. The non fiction prose includes all of his essays, together with occasional commentary on his own fiction and poetry, writings on the American short story, and reviews of work by his contemporaries, among them Donald Barthelme, Richard Brautigan, Jim Harrison, Thomas McGuane and Richard Ford. Also included is Carver’s latest essay ‘Friendship’, about a London reunion with Richard Ford and Tobias Wolff. Call If You Need Me takes us into Carver’s workshop, and alongside All of Us: The Collected Poems and Where I’m Calling from: The Selected Stories completes the picture of one of the most original writers in the English language of his generation.

Collected Stories

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.

Beginners

‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love’ is Raymond Carver’s most famous collection of short stories and remains one of the most influential pieces of modern literature to date. But the original, unedited manuscript, ‘Beginners‘ published here for the first time, was almost fifty per cent longer than the published collection. This restored version of Carver’s stories reveal what was previously unsaid, filling in the narrative silences that have both inspired and mystified readers for so long. ‘Beginners‘ is a fascinating insight into the aesthetic of a literary great and, in the questions it raises, may just spark off one of the great cultural debates of our times.

American Short Story Masterpieces

America’s most exciting and important writers are represented in this wonderfully rich collection of contemporary classics that date from the 1950s through the 1980s. Includes selections of James Baldwin, Bernard Malamud, Flannery O’Connor, Philip Roth and more. HC: Delacorte.

Carver Country

Raymond Carver’s gritty texts, combined with Adelman’s photographs of Carver’s people and haunts, re create the world of this major writer, bringing to life the bleak, blue collar towns, people, and places that became the inspiration for much of his work. 113 duotone photos.

Soul Barnacles

This book pays tribute to the literary relationship, mutuality of influence, and companionship of writers Tess Gallagher and Raymond Carver, a relationship cut short by Carver’s death in 1988. Soul Barnacles is both literary history and love story, chronicling the way a surviving partner is able to carry forward the life and work of her spouse, while pursuing her own life and literary endeavors.
In essays, letters, and interviews written after her husband’s untimely death, Gallagher explores the inextricable bonds that linked their lives and their writing. The book opens with excerpts from a journal of the couple’s last trip to Europe, and a selection of Gallagher’s introductions to Carver’s posthumous collections.
The next section focuses primarily on Robert Altman’s ‘Short Cuts,’ a film based on Carver’s short stories, and provides a rare, quietly dramatic look a poet in Hollywood, determined to see the dignified transformation of one art form into another. The collection concludes with interviews that touch upon the poet’s grieving process, the solitude and intensity of a writer’s life, and the ways in which her relationship to Carver has continued to evolve, even after death.
Tess Gallagher’s poetry collections include Portable Kisses, Instructions to the Double, Moon Crossing Bridge, and Willingly. She is also author of short story collections At the Owl Woman Saloon and The Lover of Horses and the essay collection A Concert of Tenses.