Nice introduction to contemporary writing: I am a hopeless lit. snob. I read only classics. When new books are presented to me, especially books with works published less than 40 years ago, I tend to be very cautious. Raymond Carver's collection may have just changed that. He's accessible to a wide array of readers, from hardcore English majors to "the working man" about whom he so often writes. Stories vary in length from a few pages to over ten, and while some seem to have impenetrable depth of thought, many are easily enjoyed without thinking TOO hard :)

Whether you aren't much of a reader or have books upon books that you've read and loved, this collection has something you can enjoy.

My favourites:

The Student's Wife
They're Not Your Husband
Neighbors
Put Yourself In My Shoes
Collectors
Why, Honey?
Little Things
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
Distance
The Third Thing That Killed My Father Off
So Much Water So Close to Home
Vitamins
Where I'm Calling From
Chef's House
Fever
A Small, Good Thing
Whoever Was Using This Bed
Elephant
Blackbird Pie ( )

that was fantastic

Gripping and gorgeous like no other. ( )

The first collection of shorts that I've ever read all the way through, in order, from front to back. ( )

I read "Neighbors" and got a bit nervous about my house sitters :-) ( )

Have you ever had one of those Blair moments when after weeks of being nice to everyone you have to finally make a decision which means that enemies are made as they see a must have dismissed? Well this is one of those moments. I have been struggling with Raymond Carver’s “Where I'm Calling From” a collection of thirty-seven stories chosen from several previous collections published over 20 odd years which should therefore be an ideal introduction to his work. And… wait for it… I am going to abandon it unfinished half way despite him being seen As "the American Chekhov or the laureate of the dispossessed”

Let me say up front, that his prose, ear for dialogue and depiction of the ordinariness of every day life masking unexpressed pain and joy is the best. His stories are like photos that capture the moment frozen with no past or future with all the ambiguity that the unknown allows the reader/observer. The opposite of Norman Rockwell homeliness, more akin to the photos of Walker Evans of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. But they have no plot, twists, surprises, or surface complexity of character. These are often blue collar workers in small-town or rural settings struggling with jobs, partners, children and booze and it’s the unsaid that reveals more then the fractured words.

The stories reflect his own drink problems and failed jobs and marriage in his 20s so he turned to writing to escape and short stories could get something in quickly to pay the rent and get food on the table. His life did begin to turn around and his work started to get critical alarm in his 40’s before he died of lung cancer. His accessible prose, realistic situations and comprehensible characters are seen as a counter to egghead experimentalism

But for me, I was left all too often thinking yes and what happens next even while the image created hung in my head. I also think that stories ripped from their original magazine context make the stories work harder then they needed to. I would have welcomed an edition that merged the stories with a set of photographs worthy of the writing. However, if you want to dip in and perhaps read a couple a stories a week or if you enjoy short stories then this is a book for you. As you say at the end of a failed relationship its not you it’s me, and lets remain friends. Knowing it’s really about the lack of passion. Yet the spurned has the chance of real love else where…will that be you? ( )

http://tinyurl.com/4a63ub

There's something about reading short stories that really appeals to me. 1) They go by fast. 2) There's a whole cosmos in 10 pages. 3) Only the best can do them right.

I'd never read a Carver story, but I have seen Short Cuts (based on Carver stories). A couple of those are in this collection, notably "A Good Small Thing" (which you'll remember as the Lyle Lovett piece)-- breath-taking in its depth and breadth of emotion. Most of Carver's stories are about drinking and ex-wives, but they are not repetitive. They are shocking, brutal at times, always accessible, and heartbreakingly sad. The one that will stay with me forever is "Collectors", about a vacuum cleaner salesman and the "tenant" of a home. Something about the laconic nature of the story juxtaposed with its explosive, never-revealed undercurrent completely grabbed my attention.

The last few stories are new, and they are freakily parallel to his own life in his last few years: divorcing his long-separated wife, marrying his new wife, and dying of lung cancer. It makes you wonder about a lot of things. ( )

Not much to be said is there? This is Carver, he knew what he was doing, I am pleased to read his words. Really pleased. ( )

the man has a singular voice, and for the life of me i don't know what it is that grips me so about his fiction. maybe it's the way he eases us into his fictional world? the stories are mostly vignettes rather than following the classical story line, but the endings are always guaranteed to leave one thinking. ( )

Reading Raymond Carver affects my vernacular. I begin thinking and speaking in a folksy clipped manner. All words worth more than a nickel vanish from my vocabulary. This phenomenon happens with TV shows regularly (when I watch 2 episodes of The Wire per day for a week, for example, I'll start to say muthafucka and sheeyit and bitch more often). But typically what I'm reading doesn't change how I speak. I don't coil my verbiage with endlessly looping dependent clauses when I'm reading Henry James, for instance.

But Carver's simplicity is deceptive, as they say. You can read one of his sad tales of loss and the losers who experience it in a straigtforward manner, enjoy the story and mark its lack of pretense, and miss completely its surprising depths. This collection has several stories I've read before: "A Small Good Thing" can still bring a tear to my jaded eye after a half-dozen re-visits; "Cathedral" insists that we're all blind and unable to communicate; "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" discusses darkly the greatest mystery humans face; and, of course, there's the title story, which I've taught to hundreds of undergrads,and which still knocks me for a loop. I find more symbolism in "Where I'm Calling From" each time I read it, and each time I think How in God's name could I have missed that all these years?

I missed that because Carver is a true master of the form, and his gift for subtle, simple imagery may be unmatched. All those references to fires, hearths, flames, chimneys, chimney sweeps, and wells in the title story? They add up to an impressionist masterpiece, and there are several in this volume. ( )

http://www.whitman.edu/english/carver...
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/rcarver.ht...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_... ( )

August 2, 1988 was one of the saddest days of my life. It was the day Raymond Carver died of lung cancer. He was fifty years old and, in the course of his relatively short life, he’d set the literary world spinning on a new course with his sparse-but-intense short stories. "Where I’m Calling From" collects the best works published during Carver’s lifetime and adds seven new unpublished stories.

Carver shattered the literary world, but he also sent an earthquake rumbling through my own life. I was in my early 20s, struggling as a new husband, father and working-class wage-earner, when I first read something by Carver. It was an essay called "Fires" in a collection of essays, stories and poems of the same name. I can’t remember what I was doing at the time, but I know that at some point while reading "Fires," my knees buckled and I had to sit down. Somehow, Carver had captured my life in his words. In the essay, he describes his early days as a struggling writer (yep, I thought, that’s me) and having to compete for a dryer at a public laundromat (yep, been there, too, Ray). And then he wrote:

"I remember thinking at that moment, amid the feelings of helpless frustration that had me close to tears, that nothing—and, brother, I mean nothing—that ever happened to me on this earth could come anywhere close, could possibly be as important to me, could make as much difference, as the fact that I had two children. And that I would always have them and always find myself in this position of unrelieved responsibility and permanent distraction."

Unrelieved responsibility and permanent distraction. I gulped and looked over my shoulder to see if Carver was standing there, taking notes on my life.

Since that day, I’ve read everything Carver ever wrote and I have never failed to be impressed at how well he captures the heart and soul of American life. His characters are always burdened with things like divorce, alcoholism and that unrelieved responsibility of life. Yet, glum as this sounds, there’s also a spirit of hope threaded throughout his stories. There is pain, but there is love, too.

Carver was not the first writer to use the minimalist style he became notorious for (neither, for that matter, was Hemingway), but he did bring a refreshing voice to American literature at a time when it so desperately needed renewal (the late 1970s and early 1980s).

Some of the best stories in "Where I’m Calling From" include "One More Thing," "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love," "Distance" and "Cathedral." My favorite Carver story is also here—"A Serious Talk," in which the image of a pumpkin pie dropped in a driveway carries so much thematic weight. I could read this story once a week for the rest of my life and still be moved. The same goes for the short-short called "Little Things" (elsewhere, it bears the title "Popular Mechanics"). In the space of about 500 words, Carver delivers a deeply shattering modern fable about the effects of child custody. The whole collection ends with "Errand," the last story Carver wrote. It’s a change of pace, fleshier and more lyrical and, for the first time, not set in twentieth-century America. "Errand" is about the last night in the life of Anton Chekhov, the great Russian short story writer. It is an elegy which, ironically, shadows Carver’s own death shortly after he wrote it. It’s also fitting that Chekhov was the subject of Carver’s last work. If anyone is worthy of the Russian’s crown, it is Carver.

In "…When We Talk About Raymond Carver," a collection of interviews with Carver’s friends and fellow writers, Richard Ford says that in his writing, Carver "attempted to give language to things—to moments in life—which, until you read his story, you never realized existed…His stories made you pay close attention to life."

"Where I’m Calling From" is filled with those kind of moments. On every page, there is a fresh revelation about the way we live our lives. And everywhere, you’ll see the big generous heart of Carver himself.

I’ll miss you, Ray. ( )