What We Talk about When We Talk about Love

by Raymond Carver

Overview

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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780679723059
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/18/1989
Series:	Vintage Contemporaries
Edition description:	Reissue
Pages:	176
Sales rank:	35,421
Product dimensions:	5.14(w) x 7.97(h) x 0.50(d)

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.

Table of Contents

Why Don't You Dance?
Viewfinder
Mr. Coffee and Mr. Fixit
Gazebo
I Could See the Smallest Things
Sacks
The Bath
Tell the Women We're Going
After the Demin
So Much Water So Close to Home
The Third Thing That Killed My Father Off
A Serious Talk
The Calm
Popular Mechanics
Everything Stuck to Him
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
One More Thing

What People are Saying About This

Stanley Elkin

"I'm nuts about Raymond Carver's new stories. They're real as discount stores, time clocks, the franchisus in small towns, that marriage is. His rumpled men and ragged women will break your heart."

Editorial Reviews

"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

From the Publisher

"One of the true contemporary masters." -- New York Review of Books

Robert Powers

"Splendid...The collection as a whole, unlike most, begins to grow and resonate in a wonderful cumulative effect." -- Chicago Tribune Book World

Tim O'Brien