Raymond Carver - What We Talk About When We Talk About Love - AD-FREE / PATRON ONLY EARLY ACCESS
An excellent collection of dark minimalist short stories.
Raymond Carver - What We Talk About When We Talk About Love BOOK REVIEW (YouTube)
Comments (4)
I really enjoyed this review of Raymond Carver. I actually just read his short story “The Cathedral” in my English lit class at PCC. I’m definitely going to pick this up sometime. Thank you, Cliff!
Thanks for the review. For anyone one who is interested, there's a great biography of Carver by Carol Sklenicka. Also, there is another version of this book called Beginners (with the original stories before the editing work done by Gordon Lish - who edited these stories and cut many by more than 50% in length). Willy Vlautin of Scappose, Oregon is another author worth checking out for anyone who is a fan of Carver. Northline would be a good one to start with by Vlautin. Thanks again for the review.
Was just going to mention that--Carver's minimalism was mostly due to his editor cutting a lot of the book. Curious to know how Beginners differs from What We Talk about.
I'm a big fan of Carver's. As a wannbe-writer I love the way he writes. There's something delicate in it, like you can picture him just barely tapping the keys of his typewriter. I don't mean that in a wimpy way. More like he's being delicate with delicate things. His stories are dark and not very reassuring but at the same time his compassion comes through. The only thing I don't like about him is that he can be a little too subtle for his own good. I've finished stories of his and have been like "well, ok, nicely done but if there was a point I missed it", a few too many times.