What We Talk about When We Talk about Love - (Vintage Contemporaries) by Raymond Carver (Paperback)

About the Book

Originally published: New York: Knopf, 1981.

Book Synopsis

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

Review Quotes

"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 Author

RAYMOND CARVER was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, in 1938. His first collection of stories, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please (a National Book Award nominee in 1977), was followed by What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Cathedral (nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1984), and Where I'm Calling From in 1988, when he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died August 2, 1988, shortly after completing the poems of A New Path to the Waterfall.