What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: Stories [Paperback]

In his second collection, including the iconic and much-referenced title story featured in the Academy Award-winning filmBirdman, Carver establishes his reputation as one of the most celebrated short-story writers in American literature—a haunting meditation on love, loss, and companionship, and finding one’s way through the dark.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 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. —Michael Wood, front page,The New York Times Book Review

Splendid.... The collection as a whole, unlike most, begins to grow and resonate in a wonderful cumulative effect. —Tim O'Brien,Chicago Tribune Book World

Carver not only enchants, he convinces. —J.D. Reed,Time

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