Best Selling Books by Raymond Carver

The nine stories and one poem collected in this volume formed the basis for the astonishingly original film “Short Cuts” directed by Robert Altman. Collected altogether in this volume, these stories form a searing and indelible portrait of American innocence and loss. From the collections Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, Where I’m Calling From, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, and A New Path to the Waterfall; including an introduction by Robert Altman. With deadpan humor and enormous tenderness, this is the work of “one of the true contemporary masters” (The New York Review of Books).

Part of The Wadsworh Casebooks for Reading, Research, and Writing Series, this new title provides all the materials a reader needs to complete a literary research assignment in one convenient location. Includes a concise guide to MLA documentation, including information on what kinds of information require documentation and what kinds do not.

Over the past 15 years, Granta has published fiction, memoir, biography, and reportage inspired by the relationships forced on us by the accident of birth. From Saul Bellow''s tale of his immigrant parents to Bret Easton Ellis'' chilling description of a Hollywood marriage, the best and, at times, the most disturbing are collected here in this noteworthy collection.

Fiction by Raymond Carver.

In collections such as Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Raymond Carver wrote with unflinching exactness about men and women enduring lives on the knife-edge of poverty and other deprivations. Beneath his pared-down surfaces run disturbing, violent undercurrents. Suggestive rather than explicit, and seeming all the more powerful for what is left unsaid, Carver''s stories were held up as exemplars of a new school in American fiction known as minimalism or "dirty realism," a movement whose wide influence continues to this day. Carver''s stories were brilliant in their detachment and use of the oblique, ambiguous gesture, yet there were signs of a different sort of sensibility at work. In books such as Cathedral and the later tales included in the collected stories volume Where I''m Calling From, Carver revealed himself to be a more expansive writer than in the earlier published books, displaying Chekhovian sympathies toward his characters and relying less on elliptical effects. In gathering all of Carver''s stories, including early sketches and posthumously discovered works, The Library of America''s Collected Stories provides a comprehensive overview of Carver''s career as we have come to know it: the promise of Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? and the breakthrough of What We Talk About, on through the departures taken in Cathedral and the pathos of the late stories. But it also prompts a fresh consideration of Carver by presenting Beginners, an edition of the manuscript of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love that Carver submitted to Gordon Lish, his editor and a crucial influence on his development. Lish''s editing was so extensive that at one point Carver wrote him an anguished letter asking him not to publish the book; now, for the first time, readers can read both the manuscript and published versions of the collection that established Carver as a major American writer. Offering a fascinating window into the complex, fraught relation between writer and editor, Beginners expands our sense of Carver and is essential reading for anyone who cares about his achievement. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Correspondence between Raymond Carver and David Swanger, 1977-1988.

Collection consists of letters from writer Raymond Carver, 1938-1988, to poet Robert McDowell. The letters relate mainly to Carver''s writing projects, his teaching positions, and to possible lecture engagements at McDowell''s home institutions.

Contains mostly first (some second) editions of selected works by Raymond Carver.