The 1980s was a decade of massive social, political and cultural change. 

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Reading lists

Books that shaped the 1980s

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

The short story that inspired the play at the heart of BIRDMAN starring Michael Keaton, Ed Norton and Emma Stone

The master craftsman of the modern American short story

One of America's most original, truest voices

One of the most celebrated American short-story writers of the 20th century

I remember being floored by the first Raymond Carver collection I read: What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

Raymond Carver's stories can now be counted amongst the masterpieces of American fiction

These brilliant shards - some no more than three or four pages long - confirm Carver's place in the hall of America's great writers and suggest that, with his hero Chekhov, he was one of the world's masters of the short story

Raymond Carver uses the English language like a whittler's knife, carving stark and unadorned prose-objects, paring away everything but the very core of human emotion

Raymond Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, in 1938.  His father was a saw-mill worker and his mother was a waitress and clerk.  He married early and for years writing had to come second to earning a living for his young family.  Despite, small-press publication, it was not until Will You Please Be Quiet Please? appeared in 1976 that his work began to reach a wider audience.  This was the year in which he gave up alcohol, which had contributed to the collapse of his marriage.  In 1977 he met the writer Tess Gallagher, with whom he shared the last eleven years of his life.  During this prolific period he wrote three collections of stories, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Cathedral and Elephant.  Fires, a collection of essays, poems and stories, appeared in 1985, followed by three further collections of poetry.  In 1988 he completed the poetry collection A New Path to the Waterfall.

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 1980s.

Cathedral

'All the stories in Cathedral are different; some funny, some hauntingly sad. Each has its own individual and curious power' Daily Telegraph

The twelve stories collected in his book Cathedral are remarkable for the originality of vision which he manages to convey in scrupulously simple prose. Carver's is a considerable and an enterprising talent

Cathedral ought to establish his reputation as one of the most original new voices in fiction to appear from the United States for many years

Carver is a writer of astonishing compassion and honesty, utterly free of pretence and affection, his eye set only on describing and revealing the world as he sees it. His eye is so clear, it almost breaks your heart

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.

Raymond Carver said it was possible 'to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language and endow these things - a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring - with immense, even startling power'. Nowhere is this alchemy more striking than in the title story of Cathedral in which a blind man guides the hand of a sighted man as together they draw the cathedral the blind man can never see. Many view this story, and indeed this collection, as a watershed in the maturing of Carver's work to a more confidently poetic style.

Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

'The American Chekhov' Sunday Times

Carver is the king of short fiction. His writing hits you in the pit of your stomach, and haunts you with its disenchantment. It's almost visceral.

Carver has made himself the natural successor to his true mentor, Chekhov

He is alert to the unique, inconspicuous incident, when a life or a marriage may change course decisively

Carver's stories celebrate some lasting aspects of the human condition, however minimal, conjuring up a quality of fellow feeling which gives the stories a compelling, dry-eyed poignancy, a melancholy but intensely moving authenticity

There is nobody else like him. In some ways his pared-down style is an extreme development of the Hemingway style, but Carver writes about women and the ways men relate to them far more convincingly than Hemingway ever did

Carver is a master of the clear, sharp, resonant detail

Raymond Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, in 1938. His father was a saw-mill worker and his mother was a waitress and clerk. He married early and for years writing had to come second to earning a living for his young family. Despite, small-press publication, it was not until Will You Please Be Quiet Please? appeared in 1976 that his work began to reach a wider audience. This was the year in which he gave up alcohol, which had contributed to the collapse of his marriage. In 1977 he met the writer Tess Gallagher, with whom he shared the last eleven years of his life. During this prolific period he wrote three collections of stories, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Cathedral and Elephant. Fires, a collection of essays, poems and stories, appeared in 1985, followed by three further collections of poetry. In 1988 he completed the poetry collection A New Path to the Waterfall.

With this, his first collection, Carver breathed new 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.

Elephant

'Elephant is superb and suggests how much he still had to give' Ian McEwan

Carver's stories celebrate some lasting aspects of the human condition, however minimal, conjuring up a quality of fellow feeling, which gives the stories a compelling, dry-eyed poignancy, a melancholy but intensely moving authenticity

This dazzling little collection is a treat

All the stories in this collection are superb. Each sucks the reader, with magical speed, into the hearts of the characters, while seeming to say almost nothing about them. And they are not always gloomy, these hearts

A collection of stories it would be hard to forget

Raymond Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, in 1938. His father was a saw-mill worker and his mother was a waitress and clerk. He married early and for years writing had to come second to earning a living for his young family. Despite, small-press publication, it was not until Will You Please Be Quiet Please? appeared in 1976 that his work began to reach a wider audience. This was the year in which he gave up alcohol, which had contributed to the collapse of his marriage. In 1977 he met the writer Tess Gallagher, with whom he shared the last eleven years of his life. During this prolific period he wrote three collections of stories, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Cathedral and Elephant. Fires, a collection of essays, poems and stories, appeared in 1985, followed by three further collections of poetry. In 1988 he completed the poetry collection A New Path to the Waterfall.

These seven stories were the last that Carver wrote. Among them is one of his longest, 'Errand', in which he imagines the death of Chekhov, a writer Carver hugely admired and to whose work his own was often compared. This fine story suggests that the greatest of modern short-story writers may, in the year before his untimely death, have been flexing his muscles for a longer work.

Fires

'Here is a writer of astonishing compassion and honesty, utterly free of pretence. His eye is so clear, it almost breaks your heart' Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post

Carver is a master; his stories are word perfect. His sentences stalk out meaning, following a trail of clues with patient care and painful anticipation. Fires [is] an indispensable volume and provides further proof of Carver's stature as a major American writer

These stories are perfect in pitch and tone. However harrowing their subject, or broken their characters, all of them revive one's faith in the redemptive power of straight story-telling

Carver's poetry is non-metrical, free as prose... It works well and reads beautifully

Fires is the best introduction to the full range and humanity of Carver's writing. It contains four essays, including a moving memoir od his father's working life in the saw-mills of the Pacific Northwest, a tribute to his mentor John Gardner, and the title essay about the influences on his writing life; fifty poems, many of them not collected elsewhere; and seven stories, including three from the early collection Furious Seasons.

Call If You Need Me

'Carver's technique was masterful and deft; but it is the characters - heroes in their way - of his tales that make them great and lasting works' - The Times

Raymond Carver has done what many of the most gifted writers fail to do, he has invented a country of his own

The prose is a prayer book of simple words, unsentimental. Carver's gleam

Carver the writer is still the hero of this story, as this 'last of the last' abundantly proves

In Call If You Need Me, generosity and fidelity to his characters shine from every page... In his style, Carver may have affinities with Hemingway, but his portrayal of relationships between men and women is deeper and more nuanced than anything the old bullfighter ever committed to print

Raymond Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, in 1938. His father was a saw-mill worker and his mother was a waitress and clerk. He married early and for years writing had to come second to earning a living for his young family. Despite small-press publication, it was not until Will You Please Be Quiet Please? appeared in 1976 that his work began to reach a wider audience. This was the year in which he gave up alcohol, which had contributed to the collapse of his marriage. In 1977 he met the writer Tess Gallagher, with whom he shared the last eleven years of his life. During this prolific period he wrote three collections of stories, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Cathedral and Elephant. Fires, a collection of essays, poems and stories, appeared in 1985, followed by three further collections of poetry. In 1988 he completed the poetry collection A New Path to the Waterfall.

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.

Raymond Carver

Beginners is unlikely to replace What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Instead, it will be in dialogue with it, because the story has no end: there will always be afterthoughts

Hopefully, thanks to Gallagher, every small, vital nuance, every moving observation, each choice of word as Carver wrote it, is there to be seen; that is why Carver cared enough to begin setting it right, and others have now finished the task

An extraordinary book, more generous and rambling in tone than its distilled counterpart

an extraordinary book, and probably the most influential story collection of the past 30 years

Lish may have helped put Carver on the map of the American short story, but the writer made himself its capital city.

His style is fearsome: remorselessly spare and precise yet so sharply nuanced that the ordinary people he writes about are exposed in all their messy, emotional weakness...Pure pleasure to read on its own, it is also fascinating to compare against the Lish version.

Here, for the first time, we can read the original versions. They are very good.

These vignettes remain tremendously distinctive and their characters' generally doomed attempts to keep their hope alive "in the world of men - where defeat and death are more the natural order of things" are wry and touching. Carver's landscapes of motels, "negroes" and "longhairs" are documents from another era, but they are grubby, flawed little gems that still fascinate.

The surprise is that despite Carver's well-earned reputation for spare, grainy prose that dipped into the hard-bitten lives of his characters, these stories have a richness of texture that complements Carver's austerity of tone. Lish seems to have flattened Carver's style, rather than sharpening it, and the tales in Beginners demonstrate just how great a writer Carver was

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is Carver's most famous collection of short stories and remians 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 reveals 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.

Raymond Carver

Praise for Beginners

Beginners is unlikely to replace What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Instead, it will be in dialogue with it, because the story has no end: there will always be afterthoughts

Hopefully, thanks to Gallagher, every small, vital nuance, every moving observation, each choice of word as Carver wrote it, is there to be seen; that is why Carver cared enough to begin setting it right, and others ...

An extraordinary book, more generous and rambling in tone than its distilled counterpart

Beginners is unlikely to replace What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Instead, it will be in dialogue with it, because the story has no end: there will always be afterthoughts

Hopefully, thanks to Gallagher, every small, vital nuance, every moving observation, each choice of word as Carver wrote it, is there to be seen; that is why Carver cared enough to begin setting it right, and others ...

An extraordinary book, more generous and rambling in tone than its distilled counterpart

Beginners is unlikely to replace What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Instead, it will be in dialogue with it, because the story has no end: there will always be afterthoughts

Hopefully, thanks to Gallagher, every small, vital nuance, every moving observation, each choice of word as Carver wrote it, is there to be seen; that is why Carver cared enough to begin setting it right, and others ...

An extraordinary book, more generous and rambling in tone than its distilled counterpart

Books by Raymond Carver

Articles featuring Raymond Carver

Books that shaped the 1980s

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