Books by Raymond Carver

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.

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'.

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.

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;

'I look at all of Carver's work as just one story, for his stories are all occurences, all about things that just happen to people and cause their lives to take a turn...

Raymond Carver udgør den ene halvdel af den måske mest berømte forfatter/forlægger duo. Carver afleverede manuskriptet, til det der skulle blive han store gennembrud, Hvad vi taler om, når vi taler om kærlighed, til sin redaktør Gordon Lish i 1981. Han blev dog overrasket, da Lish valgte at skære mere end 50 procent af teksten væk. Tilbage stod den hjerteskærende rene minimalisme, der siden har været synonym med forfatterskabet. Raymond Carver lovede sin kone, at han ville udgive novellerne i deres fulde længde på et senere tidspunkt, men han nåede det ikke, før han døde i 1988. Posthumt udkommer nu Begyndere, der er fuldførelsen af Carvers vision om at udgive sine noveller i deres oprindelige form. De samme knivskarpe analyser af menneskets natur og relationer er der stadig, men der er mere kød på historierne. Det, der tidligere var usagt, bliver nu sagt, og nye lag, nuancer og betydninger åbenbarer sig. ”Raymond Carvers noveller tæller blandt mesterværkerne i amerikansk fiktion.” - New York Times

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.

With this, his first collection, Carver breathed new life into the short story.

Shortly before he died, America's laureate of the dispossessed made his own selection from his short stories. This edition includes a selection from the full range of the author's work including, Furious Seasons, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, What We Talk about When We Talk about Love, and Cathedral, and seven stories from, Elephant.

Raymond Carver, who became a master-storyteller of his generation and was hailed in Europe as 'the American Chekhov', wrote of himself: "I began as a poet. For readers who know Carver's middle period only through his selected poems, In a Marine Light (1988), it includes the windfall of 51 poems not previously published in Britain.

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.