Raymond Carver: Collected Stories (LOA #195): Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? [Hardcover]

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 asWill You Please Be Quiet, Please?andWhat 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 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 asCathedraland the later tales included in the collected stories volumeWhere 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'sCollected Storiesprovides a comprehensive overview of Carver's career as we have come to know it: the promise ofWill You Please Be Quiet, Please?and the breakthrough ofWhat 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 ofWhat We Talk About When We Talk About Lovethat 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, flÓ'