What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

byRaymond Carver

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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

The master craftsman of the modern American short story

Daily Telegraph

About Raymond Carver

Raymond Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, in 1938. His first short stories appeared in Esquire during Gordon Lish's tenure as fiction editor in the 1970s. Carver's work began to reach a wider audience with the 1976 publication of Will You Please be Quiet, Please, but it was not until the 1981 publication of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love under Gordon Lish, then at Knopf, that he began to achieve real literary fame. This collection was edited by more than 40 per cent before publication, and Carver dedicated it to his fellow writer and future wife, Tess Gallagher, with the promise that he would one day republish his stories at full length. He went on to write two more collections of stories, Cathedral and Elephant, which moved away from the earlier minimalist style into a new expansiveness, as well as several collections of poetry. He died in 1988, aged fifty.
Details
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • ISBN: 9780099530329
  • Length: 144 pages
  • Dimensions: 197mm x 10mm x 129mm
  • Weight: 118g
  • Price: £9.99
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