What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

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What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

by Raymond Carver

4.31 · rating details · 8,134 ratings · 517 reviews

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.

Paperback, 176 pages

Published March 12th 1982 by Vintage (first published 1981)

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Community Reviews

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Jan 21, 2012

Joshua Nomen-Mutatio rated it

Shelves: fiction, short-stories

"Booze takes a lot of time and effort if you’re going to do a good job with it."

Indeed. If one wanted to distill the stories within this collection down to a pithy, inverted, Hallmark-style aphorism, this would be a top contender.

(Click For Review Soundtrack: "Little Person")

Drinking and smoking and talking: these are the true main characters of Carver’s world (and make no mistake: he’s summoned and crafted a distinctive world). Okay, we ...more

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Jul 14, 2009

KFed rated it

I'll announce the cliche of my loving this book before you beat me to it.

I'm an overeducated, mock-contemplative early-twenty-something with a penchant for strong male voices (despite my feminist leanings) and a distaste for anything too sentimental. I was raised in the tradition of "Show, Don't Tell" and hold this closer than even my favorite teddy (whose name is Atticus.) My middle name is "Minimalism." My other middle name is "Ooh, that sounds pretty."...moreI'll announce the cliche of my loving this book before you beat me to it.

I'm an overeducated, mock-contemplative early-twenty-something with a penchant for strong male voices (despite my feminist leanings) and a distaste for anything too sentimental. I was raised in the tradition of "Show, Don't Tell" and hold this closer than even my favorite teddy (whose name is Atticus.) My middle name is "Minimalism." My other middle name is "Ooh, that sounds pretty."

With that out of the way, yes, of course I loved this volume, and probably for the reasons you'd expect.

Raymond Carver's name should be in lights. Everyone who likes this book is going to tell you that one of Carver's strengths is his knack for understatement. I'm guessing what they're getting at is Carver's ability to keep all the mechanics of his stories imperceptible beneath the surface, with maybe a few out-of-character exceptions (the alcohol device in the title story being one). There's also the fact that Carver seems to accomplish things in the span of one page that so many authors would kill many more trees (and possibly small children, and maybe even a puppy or two) to achieve; see the opening page of "Tell The Women We're Going" to see what I mean. How many authors can convincingly sum up the entire personal history of two characters in only one paragraph?

Beneath the tightness of each story there seems to be a distinctive pulse. Not the rhythm of the language. Rather, the kind of pure life energy that all artistic works strive for (or at least they should.) When stories took turns ("for the worst" is implicit), what startled me more than each outcome was often the fact that I was so moved by them each. It's because of this pulse that characters who existed for only 3 or 4 pages still seemed to walk off the page and become real. And that's probably what will make these stories linger in my memory.

People often seem to speak of "Raymond Carver's America" when they're trying to grasp these stories. I don't know what that means, or if Raymond Carver's America is anything like mine. Whatever it is, it's tortured and beautiful. And I like it.(less)

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Dec 13, 2009

Greg rated it

Shelves: fiction, short-stories

My fucking head hurts. I should be writing my thesis, but the math part of crunching the data is hurting my head. It shouldn't though. It should be easy math. I'm dumber than I used to be. Instead I'll procrastinate, and share a review I wrote 6 years ago for another website that I haven't written a single thing on in just about 6 years. All date references should have six years added to them.

After reading MFSO's review I wanted to make some comment about a line that I really...more

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Jan 19, 2011

K.D. rated it

Recommended to K.D. by: 501 Must Read Books

Shelves: anthology, 501

Dirty Realism is the genre where this book is classified. Coined in the 80's, the dirty-realism school of writing became popular during that decade due to the writings of Raymond Carver, Angela Carter, Bobbie Ann Mason, Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff among others. Their language is sparse and their characters are the blue-collar, middle-class Americans who faced disappointments, heartbreaks and harsh truths in their ordinary lives.

I have been reading a biography of Haruki Murakami and re...moreDirty Realism is the genre where this book is classified. Coined in the 80's, the dirty-realism school of writing became popular during that decade due to the writings of Raymond Carver, Angela Carter, Bobbie Ann Mason, Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff among others. Their language is sparse and their characters are the blue-collar, middle-class Americans who faced disappointments, heartbreaks and harsh truths in their ordinary lives.

I have been reading a biography of Haruki Murakami and read last week that part saying that one of his influences is Raymond Carver. When I saw a copy of this book last Friday, I bought it right away. The reason: I like Murakami's style: the sparse, easy-to-understand narrative and, I must admit, the fantasy elements that he seems to be very fond of using.

My edition of this book is composed of 17 short eccentric yet thought-provoking stories. Very Murakami except that the fantasy elements (the talking animals, the roving television camera, etc) are totally absent. Carver's characters are all human beings but the mood is always bleak as if the his characters do not know how to laugh and see the good side of things. Don't get me wrong though; these stories will not dampen your mood. Rather, it will make you think of your own life as you see yourself (even if you are not an American), in those stories. They are short (the shortest is 3 pages) but told in minimalist manner totally devoid of excess words. Every word has a purpose and if you speed read, you will not get what the message is and you will have to go back and read again. In most of the stories, Carver did not care to put names to the characters so he just uses "woman", "man", "boy" or their pronoun equivalents. So, that could be confusing if you don't pay attention. I think the purpose of that is to make his readers see themselves in those characters.

The title story, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981) is the 16th story in this compilation (I know that in other editions it is the first). I think it is properly placed there because it is the most beautiful among the 17. Also the last story One More Thing seems to be like an afterthought of the title story so the book has that cohesive message: that Love is too hard to understand. Its meaning is elusive to most of us. Even if we keep talking about Love, we don't really know what it is really.

And yes, it is obvious that Murakami even got his inspiration from Carver's title when he came up with his non-fiction book: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. Talk about originality.(less)

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Dec 13, 2007

Lesley rated it

Recommends it for: it's hard to say...

As I recall, reading this book is like chain smoking in a cinder block walled room (with a burn-marked reddish-orange carpet) and dropping your butts into a half empty beer can resting on a round chipped wood laminate table. Reading this book is like going to the movie-version of an NA meeting in a church basement. It's all gritty, full of one quarter hope and three quarters deep, devastating tragedy. That sounds totally awful, but really you just have to be in the right mood.

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Dec 14, 2011

M.L. Rudolph rated it

1974. Simple powerful tales that magically come alive in your hands.

Carver slips inside his characters with such skill and grace that you don't read so much as eavesdrop.

These stories are of intense moments for troubled people. Or they are the stories troubled people tell others to pretend their lives are in balance when they aren't.

The spare yet elegant writing projects lives at the near-boil, poised or paralysed for choice.

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Jan 27, 2009

Trin rated it

Shelves: american-lit, shortstories

Stylistically incredible if relentlessly depressing short stories. I read this because Haruki Murakami counts Carver as an influence, and I can see that: they share a certain spare clarity of prose, and an occasional touch of beautiful oddness (though Murakami takes the latter much farther than Carver does). But while Murakami is often quite funny, Carver is just bleak—read too many of these stories in a row and you’ll want to throw yourself off the roof. Read in sequence like that, they also st...more

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Mar 29, 2011

Jana rated it

Few years ago I saw Jindabyne, movie based on Carver's story 'So Much Water So Close to Home' and I loved it. It left me numb and a bit disoriented. I started reading Carver more than five times during the last ten years, but I didn't find him any good. Of course, reading Carver is all connected with the right age and coming back to full circle. When you can understand segments of marginal psyche of people with whose life you can easily identify yourself with. Carver is not a smooth writer, I s...more

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Jan 26, 2012

Shovelmonkey1 rated it

· review of another edition

Recommends it for: people who wondered what Hemingway was like on dry land

Recommended to Shovelmonkey1 by: seen it around - the title got me curious

Shelves: read-in-2011

In friendship
In affection
In love
In lust
In perpetuity
In memoriam

Is this what we talk about when we talk about love? Carver's stories are short, pared down love stories, stripped of everything but the necessary words and the skeletal, frequently all too human frame upon which to hang them. Some of his work doesn't seem like a love story at all, think Hemingway, if he left out the toros, marlin fishing and drinking. Carver is a landlocked Hemingway in fact...more

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Jan 07, 2009

Allison rated it

The opening story in this collection really threw me. I thought I had garnered a better grasp on sparse prose, the understated, the unstated, from recent reading material, but that first story really just baffled me. I had no idea what to think of it. Proceeding along, there were stories that certainly struck a chord in me, for example the one about a father slash ex-husband visiting his ex-wife and kids on Christmas, and the tensions there, while other stories left me wanting more of an expl...more

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Apr 26, 2009

Jean rated it

Shelves: short-stories, mind-blowers

Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is a masterpiece of short stories. The stories though sparse in length makes one reevaluate how he/she views life experiences of others. Carver takes what seem as inconsequential life experiences and weaves them into power packed encounters.
(The Third Thing That Killed My Father)exolores the relationship between a mute man and his friend which is revealed for what it is when the mute dies in a flood. (The Bath) is the story o...more

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Aug 26, 2010

Rowland Bismark rated it

“And the terrible thing, the terrible thing is, but the good thing too, the saving grace, you might say, is that if something happened to one of us tomorrow, I think . . . the other person, would grieve for a while, you know, but then the surviving party would go out and love again, have someone else soon enough.”

Mel makes this comment roughly halfway through the story, after he has told everyone that he’ll explain to them what love really is.

Carver is known for his mini...more“And the terrible thing, the terrible thing is, but the good thing too, the saving grace, you might say, is that if something happened to one of us tomorrow, I think . . . the other person, would grieve for a while, you know, but then the surviving party would go out and love again, have someone else soon enough.”

Mel makes this comment roughly halfway through the story, after he has told everyone that he’ll explain to them what love really is.

Carver is known for his minimalist approach to prose, and for this reason he’s often compared to Ernest Hemingway and Anton Chekhov. His short stories focus on middle-class, often blue-collar people who are struggling with hard truths, disappointments, inertia, and small glimmers of hope in their ordinary lives. Along with writers such as Ann Beattie and Tobias Wolff, Carver is considered a writer of the “dirty-realism” school. Carver’s short stories are also recognizable for their abrupt endings, sometimes called “zero endings,” which do not seem to tie up the story neatly, if at all. “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” is one of Carver’s most famous stories and often regarded as the epitome of the dirty-realism school.

Carver and his wife divorced in 1982, and Carver married his longtime girlfriend, writer Tess Gallagher, in 1988. They were married for only a few months before Carver died from lung cancer at age fifty. After his death, his editor, Gordon Lish, claimed that he edited Carver’s work so heavily that he should be considered a coauthor of the stories. Carver’s widow, Gallagher, similarly claimed ownership of Carver’s stories and said Carver had borrowed story ideas from her own work. Such accusations, however, have not tarnished Carver’s legacy, and he remains one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century.

The nature of love remains elusive throughout “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” despite the characters’ best efforts to define it. Mel tries again and again to pinpoint the meaning of love, but his examples never build up to any coherent conclusion. For example, he tells his friends about an elderly couple who nearly died in a car crash, but the conclusion of the story—the old man depressed by not being able to see his wife—merely confuses everyone. When he asserts that he’ll tell everyone exactly what love is, he instead digresses into a muddled meditation about how strange it is that he and the others have loved more than one person. His attempts to clarify the nature of love eventually devolve into a bitter tirade against his ex-wife. He seems much more certain about what love is notand tells Terri several times that if abusive love is true love, then she “can have it.”

Laura and Nick believe that they know what love is, but they never really provide a clear definition or explain why they’re so certain in their convictions. They merely demonstrate their love for each other by blushing and holding hands, but these actions simply support the mystery of love rather than unmask it. Terri, of all the friends, seems to be most certain about the meaning of love and repeatedly claims that her abusive ex-boyfriend, Ed, truly loved her, despite his crazy way of showing it. The examples she provides of this love—beating, stalking, and threatening—are disturbing but serve as proof in her mind. Like the others, however, she cannot translate her certainty into any kind of clear explanation of the nature of love.

Although the four friends talk for a while about love, the fact that they never manage to define it suggests that language can’t adequately describe emotional, abstract subjects. Mel does the most talking, but his bloated stories and rambling digressions show that he has trouble conveying his thoughts and feelings, despite how much he talks. Terri speaks a great deal about her former lover Ed, but when Mel challenges her, she turns to intuition to prove her point. She believes that Ed loved her no matter what Mel or the others think, demonstrating that gut feelings about love can be more powerful and accurate than words. Laura and Nick, meanwhile, say very little about the nature of love and instead rely on physical gestures to clarify what language cannot: they hold hands, blush, and touch each other’s legs. Carver indicates that words simply aren’t enough when talking about love, which is probably why all four friends have fallen silent by the end of the story.

The sun in the story, which is bright at the beginning and gone by the end, represents the loss of clarity and happiness as the friends grow increasingly confused about the meaning of love. At the beginning of the story, Nick notes that the kitchen is bright and compares the friends to giddy children who have “agreed on something forbidden.” The talk is light and hopeful, just a friendly conversation on a gin-soaked afternoon. However, as the conversation about love becomes increasingly dark and complex, the sun in the kitchen slips slowly away. Nick notes that the sun is “changing, getting thinner,” and, not long after, that the sun is “draining out of the room.” As the sun disappears completely, the conversation devolves into Mel’s drunken threats against his ex-wife, including a fantasy of murdering her. At the end of the story, the friends are sitting in complete darkness. The sun has gone, as have their rosy, hopeful perceptions of love.(less)

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Oct 14, 2011

Vivisection rated it

Shelves: contemporary-fiction, the-americans

I got into a drunken conversation about writing with a co-worker last night--apropos for a review of Raymond Carver, n'est pas? Anyway. I was blathering on about how I dislike Hemingway in general. I know, blasphemy for an English teacher and all. I went on to mention that, strangely, I do like Raymond Carver very much. I went on to wax poetic about What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. A little tipsy and suddenly infatuated with the idea of Carver, I came home and promptly re-read th...more

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Dec 09, 2008

selena rated it

Shelves: shortstories, thebest

Having finished What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, I can understand why Carver smoked and drank himself to death. Reading the collection felt like a walk on the darker side of human nature. Please don't misunderstand, I think the man was responsible for making the story story a credible literary genre but he was tragically troubled.

I approached this book knowing that Carver is widely known for writing candidly about the blue-collar experience in his trademark minimalist (and...moreHaving finished What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, I can understand why Carver smoked and drank himself to death. Reading the collection felt like a walk on the darker side of human nature. Please don't misunderstand, I think the man was responsible for making the story story a credible literary genre but he was tragically troubled.

I approached this book knowing that Carver is widely known for writing candidly about the blue-collar experience in his trademark minimalist (and often autobiographical) style. I felt that this collection of stories features some of Carver's best work.

This wasn't a particularly long book nor did it require hours of analysis. Nevertheless, it took me a long time to read. I tried to read a few stories each time but found my mood significantly dropping after each one. The two stories that will stay with me no matter how much time passes have to be "Bath" and "Tell the Women We're Going."

The story "Bath" is about a boy who is hit by a car on his birthday and subsequently goes into a coma. With his father and mother by his side, his chest rises and falls but his eyes stay closed. The story truly broke my heart. Upon finishing it, I couldn't read any further. I felt like I needed to walk around a little and clear my head. I regret having already forgotten the little boy's name.

The most disturbing story of them all is Carver's pseudo-horror story called "Tell the Women We're Going." Two friends, both married, who've been friends for a long time decide to leave their wives at the intimate picnic so they can go drive around for a while. Somewhere along the way, they spot two girls on a bike and decide to strike up some conversation. They figure out where the girls are going and go there ahead of them. One guy is seriously interested in cheating on his wife with the girl. The other states no intent. However, he ends up bashing their heads in with a rock...

Something about the way that the story was presented to me, disturbed me profoundly. I'm accustomed to reading about killers and horrendous murder scenes, but it sprang up on me unexpectedly. I hadn't realized the man was a monster. Probably because he seemed like a husk of a man. What I enjoy about Raymond however, is that he does not try to tell us that this is good or bad, instead he doesn't say anything. This is what makes him the author that he is - his ability to show us true life, the sad picture in the mirror looking back at mankind.

I think this is a book that I will come back to and one meant to be re-read.(less)

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Feb 18, 2008

Josh rated it

Recommends it for: Anybody who has ever tried beer and has a touch of melancholy.

I picked-up this book at Novel Idea when I started getting serious about writing a few years back. I just finished reading it for a second time and, though it sounds cliche, Raymond Carver is a true master of the short story. At turns dead-pan and poignant, at others hilarious and chilling, "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love," has sort of been my creative writing teacher over the years. What's interesting to me is how my favorites in the collection have changed this time ar...more

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Dec 26, 2010

Taka rated it

Shelves: 1-fiction-you-must-read, american_lit, contemporary, japan_jul07-aug10

Awesome--

This has been on my reading list for the longest time and I finally got around to it, only to realize how dumb I'd been for putting it off for so long.

It's GOOD.

Like, really good.

Simple, lyrical, and resonant, the stories really grow on you and you find yourself sucked into them. The Carver-Lish tag team has done a wonderful job creating these golden nuggets of shorts.

Having read them, I'm amazed how much Murakami owes his style to Carv...more

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Jan 19, 2009

Jen rated it

Hopelessly desperate and deceptively simple. Great for a literary detox after Austen.

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Jun 27, 2007

Claire rated it

I wanted to love this book. I did, really. I just couldn't. It was stark, bleak, and pessimistic, true, which wouldn't necessarily have killed it for me if I thought he had genuinely interesting things to say. As it was, he had some intriguing story lines, so he got a three, but the insight/exceptional creativity/brilliant command of language that I was hoping for never really materialized.

People whose literary opinion I respect absolutely loved this book; maybe you're one of the...more

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Mar 18, 2009

Laura rated it

Carver can write a spare line like nobody's business and what he doesn't say haunts you more than what he does. I knew going in that this was "dirty realism", but this little collection of sad sack stories was often too down and too dirty for me. There were some amazing gems in this that were perfect from sad start to lonely end, but in every single story someone either cheats or is cheated on or has some kind of crap-tastic tragedy befall them. It can wear a reader down. The guy sure ...more

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Sep 16, 2011

Chris rated it

Shelves: american, short-stories

I read someone say that Raymond Carver was to the 80s what David Foster Wallace was to the 00s, and if that's the case, then I would have much rather lived through the 80s. But I found Carver especially relevant now, when there's a constant din of noise and information and words. It's so refreshing--you could say elevated, even--to read such finely constructed (and edited, thanks to Gordon Lish, of course) writing that brings your attention to the very words, with not an excess one to be found. ...more

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Jun 06, 2011

David rated it

Maybe the women I've been looking for can only be found North of Redding and South of Yakima from 1974-1981. These are sweet stories about pac-northwest booze-bags who tend to fuck things up when everything is looking grand. Lots of cruelty, some hazy moments of grace. Nothing extraneous.

Gazebo -- That morning she pours Teacher's over my belly and licks it off. That afternoon she tries to jump out the window.

Tell the Women We're Going -- He never knew what Jerry wanted. B...more

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Apr 21, 2011

Shelley rated it

Shelves: favorites

This moody collection of short stories with a title I'm sure no one could resist is filled with the kind of characters who work with their hands, live paycheck to paycheck, smoke, drink, and are trapped in their mediocre lives by their own failures, lack of education, and inability to see beyond their situations. Raymond Carver's ability to capture the essence of these characters using such sparse and understated language is unlike any other writer I've read. He chooses each word with such delib...more

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Dec 10, 2010

Monthly Book Group rated it

Raymond Carver’s dark world received a generally enthusiastic response. “Powerful!”. “Challenging!”. “Brilliant stuff – a whole desperate society emerged from a few sentences”. “Reminded me of a Country and Western song – a compliment – with a refrain of failed relationships and alcohol amongst blue collar people in the Mid-West.” “I liked the way meanings and new perceptions emerged as you reflected on the story”. “Liked Carver more than when I read him twenty five years ago, perhaps because of...moreRaymond Carver’s dark world received a generally enthusiastic response. “Powerful!”. “Challenging!”. “Brilliant stuff – a whole desperate society emerged from a few sentences”. “Reminded me of a Country and Western song – a compliment – with a refrain of failed relationships and alcohol amongst blue collar people in the Mid-West.” “I liked the way meanings and new perceptions emerged as you reflected on the story”. “Liked Carver more than when I read him twenty five years ago, perhaps because of more life experience since!”.

“Initially I didn’t like the abrupt conclusions, but then I tuned into the stories and found them refreshing”. “Presents you with a raw slab of life as it is, with only one or two nerve endings going into the future, and a few more into the past”. “You have to read with great care, because if you miss one word the whole meaning changes”. “The stories have the concentration, complexity and chiselling of a poem”. “The opening lines really grab you and pull you in – e.g. ‘I’ll tell you what did my father in. The third thing was…’". ” “Like an Edward Hopper painting, where the characters tend to be gazing out of a window, in which there is a sinister sense of an untold story”.

So straight tens from all the judges? No, not quite. “Eventually the dark plots about alcohol and failed relationships begin to pall. What about all the joy and excitement also to be found in blue-collar life? He’s a one-trick pony…”. “Stylistically Carver comes from the school of minimalism. This begs the question, when we applaud the writing, are we applauding the fact that so much meaning can be expressed in so few words? Is this the aim of the writing style? I found the style overbearing, however, and it leaves little room for the reader to manoeuvre… I found I had really to slow down the reading and study the words which was in one sense quite rewarding, but also quite restrictive”.

This is an extract from a review at: http://www.monthlybookgroup.com/ Our reviews are also to be found at http://monthlybookgroup.blogspot.com/
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Nov 18, 2010

Eric Kibler rated it

I had just a few more stories to read in this book and I finally finished it. That's the great thing about short story collections. Finish a story, put a bookmark in it, and you can pick it up again after a long absence without starting over again.

Carver has become one of my favorites. The plainspoken characters. The stark but beautiful use of nature. The unexpected volatility and tenderness of his characters. The specter of sometimes sinister doings. The endings that sometimes provoke...more

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Sep 04, 2010

Terri rated it

Shelves: 11th-grade-ms-kwans-advisory

This book has four characters, Mel, Terri, Nick, and Laura. This is about two married couples. Throughout the book, it focuses on the obstacles, and the beauty in relationships. The negative effects of love is when Terri talks about her ex, Ed. Ed used to abuse Terri but she always thought it was love, until she finally realized that it wasn't love at all. She mentioned that he could have killed her because he loved her so much, but he showed it in wrong ways. Mel thought there was a probl...more

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Apr 09, 2010

Tessa Rose rated it

For me, Raymond Carver's style is completely unique. He is masterful with language. His stories often leave me feeling just slightly uncomfortable. He is unafraid to probe the dark edges of human psyche and in fact seems to thoroughly enjoy shining a light into those dark places. I greatly enjoy the honesty of his characters. They are bluntly drawn, and full in form. They are captivating as is his style.
Some fave excerpts:
From the story "Everything Stuck to Him"
"Thi...more

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Nov 04, 2009

Matthew rated it

Shelves: 2009, reread

Two things that were on my mind as I read this for maybe the dozenth time:

1. Carver is so often extolled for the verisimilitude of his dialogue, but it's not really there, is it? Even the most moving lines (especially those, actually) I can't imagine anyone uttering outside a Carver story. Not without serious affectation, anyway. Carver himself said the same of Hemingway, that no one actually spoke like Hemingway characters - until they read Hemingway. He was right, of course. And I ...more

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Nov 30, 2008

justme rated it

There is a sort of quiet aching type of quality about all of Carver's short stories.

I won't lie. I didn't quite "get it" with all of the stories. But I think, perhaps, that's what the reader is supposed to feel. The ever present sense of loss, confusion...a sort of bittersweetness about it all. None of the characters ever feel completely at ease or ever fully satisfied. Because of that, each story packs a large amount of tension that clearly comes through.

The st...more

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Aug 27, 2011

Vincent rated it

Carver's genius is for moments of pathos; for moments of carefully observed humanity; for human foibles unflinchingly, but never unkindly, revealed. You really have to read him for yourself to understand, but here's an example: the story "Gazebo", which is one of my favourites from this collection. The story works because what 'the gazebo' means to the couple in the story is something most of us have felt: a dream of future happiness that is now lost to us; lost because we don't see ho...more

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Aug 24, 2010

Mark Welker rated it

Carver had always been a bit of a literary mystery to me, I'd often heard his name but not once had I seen a book of his on a shelf or been exposed to his writing while studying. I picked up this collection through a friends recommendation, and though it is short, it has had a great impact on my own writing.

Carver himself declared an interest in the "marrow" of stories, and his stories follow this theme with a sparse, minimalist narrative and prose style that cuts straight ...more

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About Raymond Carver

Carver was born into a poverty-stricken family at the tail-end of the Depression. The son of a violent alcoholic, he married at 19, started a series of menial jobs and his own career of 'full-time drinking as a serious pursuit'. A career that would eventually kill him. Constantly struggling to support his wife and family Carver enrolled in a writing programme under author John Gardner in 1958 and ...more

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Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories

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“Mel thought real love was nothing less than spiritual love. He'd said he'd spent five years in a seminary before quitting to go to medical school. He said he still looked back on those years in the seminary as the most important years of his life.” — 4 people liked it

“Booze takes a lot of time and effort if you’re going to do a good job with it.” — 4 people liked it

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title link	preview: What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
avg rating	preview: What We Talk About When We Talk About Love Goodreads rating: 4.31 (8134 ratings)
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BBCode	[url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11438.What_We_Talk_About_When_We_Talk_About_Love?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book][img]http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1327868314m/11438.jpg[/img][/url] [url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11438.What_We_Talk_About_When_We_Talk_About_Love?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book]What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver[/url]

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

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