Everyone who likes this book is going to tell you that one of Carver's strengths is his knack for understatement. Raymond Carver's name should be in lights. With that out of the way, yes, of course I loved this volume, and probably for the reasons you'd expect. I was raised in the tradition of 'Show, Don't Tell' and hold this closer than even my favorite teddy (whose name is Atticus.) My middle name is 'Minimalism.' My other middle name is 'Ooh, that sounds pretty.' I'm an overeducated, mock-contemplative early-twenty-something with a penchant for strong male voices (despite my feminist leanings) and a distaste for anything too sentimental. I'll announce the cliche of my loving this book before you beat me to it. He finally married his long-term parter Tess Gallagher (they met ten years earlier at a writers' conference in Dallas) in Reno, Nevada, less than two months before he eventually lost his fight with cancer. Alcohol had eventually shattered his health, his work and his family - his first marriage effectively ending in 1978. As well as being a master of the short story, he was an accomplished poet publishing several highly acclaimed volumes.Īfter the 'line of demarcation' in Carver's life - 2 June 1977, the day he stopped drinking - his stories become increasingly more redemptive and expansive. Carver writes with meticulous economy, suddenly bringing a life into focus in a similar way to the paintings of Edward Hopper. Set in trailer parks and shopping malls, they are stories of banal lives that turn on a seemingly insignificant detail. Rejecting the more experimental fiction of the 60s and 70s, he pioneered a precisionist realism reinventing the American short story during the eighties, heading the line of so-called 'dirty realists' or 'K-mart realists'. He saw this opportunity as a turning point. Constantly struggling to support his wife and family, Carver enrolled in a writing programme under author John Gardner in 1958. He married at 19, started a series of menial jobs and his own career of 'full-time drinking as a serious pursuit', a career that would eventually kill him. Carver was born into a poverty-stricken family at the tail-end of the Depression.

Raymond carver what we talk about