Sublimely portable and long-overdue.

Mr. Lish's editing of the stories improved their pace and ­concision—frequently at the cost of simply cutting them short or injecting a note of ­ambiguity. If Mr. Carver's original versions often fail to reach a satisfying moral conclusion in "Beginners," Mr. Lish often guts these stories so thoroughly that their central dilemmas disappear.

"Beginners" is published for the first time in "Collected Stories," and although it comes at the end, it can't help but function as a centerpiece. That's either as it should be or a significant problem, depending on your perspective, but regardless, it skews the way the collection showcases Carver's career. The purpose of a retrospective is not so much to highlight individual stories as to trace how a writer's aesthetic has grown. Here, the prominence of "Beginners" adds a subtext that threatens to subvert the larger arc.