WhatWeTalkAboutWhenWeTalkAboutLove

Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love “Is there a better contemporary writer of short stories than Raymond Carver? Perhaps a handful as good, but none better …. Nearly 200 years ago, Wordsworth and Coleridge started a revolution when they proclaimed their aim to write in ‘the language really used by men.’ Neither of them quite achieved that. In [this collection], Raymond Carver has. And it is terrifying.” —Robert Houston, The Nation “In Raymond Carver’s stories, it is dangerous even to speak. Conversation completes the damage people have already done to one another in silence. It is not safe to form a sentence or even to speak a name. To say ‘Duane’ or ‘Holly’ is to pronounce yet another doom. This is the fiction Carver writes, and I know of nothing stronger in its kind.” —Denis Donoghue “Masterful…. The first impact of all the stories is sharp and visceral. Only afterward, as the skeleton of each one keeps rattling in the mind, does the painstaking intelligence of their designer become apparent.” —Meredith Marsh, New Republic “I’m nuts about Raymond Carver’s new stories. They’re real as discount stores, time clo......