What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

Stories

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$16.00 US
Knopf | Vintage
24 per carton
On sale Jun 18, 1989 | 978-0-679-72305-9
Sales rights: US, Canada, Open Mkt
The most celebrated story collection from “one of the true American masters” (The New York Review of Books)—a haunting meditation on love, loss, and companionship, and finding one’s way through the dark that includes the iconic and much-referenced title story featured in the Academy Award-winning film Birdman. 

"Raymond Carver's America is ... clouded by pain and the loss of dreams, but it is not as fragile as it looks. It is a place of survivors and a place of stories.... [Carver] 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
Why Don't You Dance?
Viewfinder
Mr. Coffee and Mr. Fixit
Gazebo
I Could See the Smallest Things
Sacks
The Bath
Tell the Women We're Going
After the Demin
So Much Water So Close to Home
The Third Thing That Killed My Father Off
A Serious Talk
The Calm
Popular Mechanics
Everything Stuck to Him
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
One More Thing
"One of the true contemporary masters." —The New York Review of Books

"Carver's fiction is so spare in manner that it takes a time before one realizes how completely a whole culture and a whole moral condition is represented by even the most seemingly slight sketch. This second volume of stories is clearly the work of a full-grown master." —Frank Kermode

"Raymond Carver's America is ... clouded by pain and the loss of dreams, but it is not as fragile as it looks. It is a place of survivors and a place of stories.... [Carver] 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

"Splendid.... The collection as a whole, unlike most, begins to grow and resonate in a wonderful cumulative effect." —Chicago Tribune Book World

"Carver not only enchants, he convinces." —Time

About

The most celebrated story collection from “one of the true American masters” (The New York Review of Books)—a haunting meditation on love, loss, and companionship, and finding one’s way through the dark that includes the iconic and much-referenced title story featured in the Academy Award-winning film Birdman. 

"Raymond Carver's America is ... clouded by pain and the loss of dreams, but it is not as fragile as it looks. It is a place of survivors and a place of stories.... [Carver] 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

Table of Contents

Why Don't You Dance?
Viewfinder
Mr. Coffee and Mr. Fixit
Gazebo
I Could See the Smallest Things
Sacks
The Bath
Tell the Women We're Going
After the Demin
So Much Water So Close to Home
The Third Thing That Killed My Father Off
A Serious Talk
The Calm
Popular Mechanics
Everything Stuck to Him
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
One More Thing

Praise

"One of the true contemporary masters." —The New York Review of Books

"Carver's fiction is so spare in manner that it takes a time before one realizes how completely a whole culture and a whole moral condition is represented by even the most seemingly slight sketch. This second volume of stories is clearly the work of a full-grown master." —Frank Kermode

"Raymond Carver's America is ... clouded by pain and the loss of dreams, but it is not as fragile as it looks. It is a place of survivors and a place of stories.... [Carver] 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

"Splendid.... The collection as a whole, unlike most, begins to grow and resonate in a wonderful cumulative effect." —Chicago Tribune Book World

"Carver not only enchants, he convinces." —Time