All of Us (49 page)

Zhivago with a fine moustache

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 in August of that year, shortly after completing the poems of
A New Path to the Waterfall.

R
AYMOND
C
ARVER

CALL IF YOU NEED ME

Call If You Need Me
traces the arc of Carver’s career, not in the widely anthologized stories that have become classics, but through his uncollected fiction and his essays. Here are the five “last” stories, discovered a decade after Carver’s death. Here also are Carver’s first published story, the fragment of an unfinished novel, and all his nonfiction—from a recollection of his father to reflections on writers as varied as Anton Chekhov and Donald Barthelme.
Call If You Need Me
invites us to travel with a singular artist, step by step, as he discovers what is worth saying and how to say it so it pierces the heart.

Fiction/Literature

CATHEDRAL

“A dozen stories that overflow with the danger, excitement, mystery and possibility of life.… Carver is a writer of astonishing compassion and honesty … his eye set only on describing and revealing the world as he sees it. His eye is so clear, it almost breaks your heart” (Jonathan Yardley,
The Washington Post Book World
).

Fiction/Literature

FIRES

More than sixty stories, poems, and essays are included in this wide-ranging collection by the amazingly gifted and versatile Raymond Carver. Two of the stories—later revised for
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
—are particularly notable in that between the first and final versions, we see clearly the astounding process of Carver’s literary development.

Fiction/Poetry/Essays

SHORT CUTS

The works of fiction—nine stories and one poem—collected in this volume form the basis of an astonishingly original film directed by Robert Altman. These now-classic stories, when read together, form a searing and indelible portrait of American innocence and loss. With deadpan humor and enormous tenderness, the film
Short Cuts
reinvents and dramatizes them as only an artist of Altman’s caliber could, giving new insight into the work of “one of the true contemporary masters” (
The New York Review of Books
).

Fiction/Literature

WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT LOVE

In his second collection of stories, as in his first, Carver’s characters are peripheral people—people without education, insight, or prospects, people too unimaginative to even give up. Carver celebrates these men and women.

Fiction/Literature

WHERE I’M CALLING FROM

Carver’s last collection encompasses classic stories from
Cathedral, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
, and earlier Carver volumes, along with seven works previously unpublished in book form. Together, these thirty-seven stories give us a superb overview of Carver’s life work and show us why he was so widely imitated but never equaled.

Fiction/Literature

WILL YOU PLEASE BE QUIET, PLEASE?

With this, his first collection of stories, Raymond Carver breathed new life into the American short story and instantly became the recognized master of the form. Carver shows us the humor and tragedy that dwell in the hearts of ordinary people. His stories are the classics of our time.

Fiction/Literature

ALL OF US

Although he won his greatest acclaim as a writer of short stories, Raymond Carver began his career as a poet, and he continued to write poetry until his death in 1988. With this stunningly rich collection, the full extent of his achievement is finally evident. The more than three hundred poems in
All of Us
possess all the virtues of Carver’s fiction: a keen attention to the physical world; an uncanny ability to compress vast feeling into discreet moments; a voice of conversational intimacy; and an unstinting sympathy for “all of us, all of us, all of us / trying to save / our immortal souls.” This edition brings together all the poems of Carver’s four previous books, along with those posthumously published in
No Heroics, Please.
It also contains bibliographical and textual notes on individual poems; a chronology of Carver’s life and work; and a moving introduction by Carver’s widow, the poet Tess Gallagher.

Poetry

ULTRAMARINE

“Mr. Carver is heir to that most appealing American poetic voice, the lyricism of Theodore Roethke and James Wright.… This book is a treasure, one to return to. No one’s brevity is as rich, as complete, as Raymond Carver’s” (
The New York Times Book Review
).

Poetry

WHERE WATER COMES TOGETHER WITH OTHER WATER

A vast collection of poems that won
Poetry
magazine’s Levinson Prize. “Somehow the nuances of daily experience, the warmth, humor, and reflection the poet brings to subjects are quite unlike anyone else’s” (Joseph Parisi).

Poetry

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