Call if You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction and Other Prose Read online

  Fiction/Literature

  FIRES

  More than sixty stories, poems, and essays are included in this wide-ranging collection by the amazingly gifted and versatile Raymond Carver. Two of the stories—later revised for What We Talk About When We Talk About Love—are particularly notable in that between the first and final versions, we see clearly the astounding process of Carver’s literary development.

  Fiction/Poetry/Essays

  SHORT CUTS

  The works of fiction—nine stories and one poem—collected in this volume form the basis of an astonishingly original film directed by Robert Altman. These now-classic stories, when read together, form a searing and indelible portrait of American innocence and loss. With deadpan humor and enormous tenderness, the film Short Cuts reinvents and dramatizes them as only an artist of Altman’s caliber could, giving new insight into the work of “one of the true contemporary masters” (The New York Review of Books).

  Fiction/Literature

  WHAT WE TALK ABOUT

  WHEN WE TALK ABOUT LOVE!

  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.

  Fiction/Literature

  WHERE I’M CALLING FROM

  Carver’s last collection encompasses classic stories from Cathedral, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, and earlier Carver volumes, along with seven works previously unpublished in book form. Together, these thirty-seven stories give us a superb overview of Carver’s life work and show us why he was so widely imitated but never equaled.

  Fiction/Literature

  WILL YOU PLEASE BE QUIET, PLEASE?

  With this, his first collection of stories, Raymond Carver breathed new life into the American short story and instantly became the recognized master of the form. Carver shows us the humor and tragedy that dwell in the hearts of ordinary people. His stories are the classics of our time.

  Fiction/Literature

  ALL OF US

  Although he won his greatest acclaim as a writer of short stories, Raymond Carver began his career as a poet, and he continued to write poetry until his death in 1988. With this stunningly rich collection, the full extent of his achievement is finally evident. The more than three hundred poems in All of Us possess all the virtues of Carver’s fiction: a keen attention to the physical world; an uncanny ability to compress vast feeling into discreet moments; a voice of conversational intimacy; and an unstinting sympathy for “all of us, all of us, all of us / trying to save / our immortal souls.” This edition brings together all the poems of Carver’s four previous books, along with those posthumously published in No Heroics, Please. It also contains bibliographical and textual notes on individual poems; a chronology of Carver’s life and work; and a moving introduction by Carver’s widow, the poet Tess Gallagher.

  Poetry

  ULTRAMARINE

  “Mr. Carver is heir to that most appealing American poetic voice, the lyricism of Theodore Roethke and James Wright.… This book is a treasure, one to return to. No one’s brevity is as rich, as complete, as Raymond Carver’s” (The New York Times Book Review).

  Poetry

  WHERE WATER COMES TOGETHER WITH OTHER WATER

  A vast collection of poems that won Poetry magazine’s Levinson Prize. “Somehow the nuances of daily experience, the warmth, humor, and reflection the poet brings to subjects are quite unlike anyone else’s” (Joseph Parisi).

  Poetry

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