Raymond Carver, known in some circles as the godfather of minimalism, has been credited by many as the rejuvenator of the once-dying American short story. (See the link on this page to a 2008 "Kenyon Review" story that discusses the recent controversy over the editing of Carver s stories.) Drawing on representative tales from each of Carver s major volumes of fiction, Nesset s critical exploration leads us deep into the heart of Carver country, an eerie post-industrial world of low-rent survivors. In the earliest fiction, the politics of sex are tied to politics of fortune and chance;...

This collection of Raymond Carver's interviews reveals him to have been perhaps the premier short-story writer of his generation, a lyric-narrative poet of singular resonance, and a staunch proponent of realistic fiction in the wake of postmodern formalism. The twenty-five conversations gathered here, several available in English for the first time, include craft interviews, biographical portraits, self-analyses, and wide-ranging reflections on the current literary scene.

Carver discusses his changing views of his widely influential fiction collections What We Talk About When We Talk...

Raymond Carver's spare dramas of loneliness, despair, and troubled relationships breathed new life into the American short story of the 1970s and ?80s. In collections such as Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, 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...