Author:Raymond Carver
This powerful collection of stories, set in the mid-West among the lonely men and women who drink, fish and play cards to ease the passing of time, was the first by Raymond Carver to be published in the UK. With its spare, colloquial narration and razor-sharp sense of how people really communicate, the collection was to become one of the most influential literary works of the 1980s.
The master craftsman of the modern American short story
—— Daily TelegraphOne of America's most original, truest voices
—— Salman RushdieOne of the most celebrated American short-story writers of the 20th century
—— New York TimesA remarkable collection
—— New York Review of BooksI remember being floored by the first Raymond Carver collection I read: What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
—— David Sedaris , New York TimesRaymond Carver's stories can now be counted amongst the masterpieces of American fiction
—— New York TimesThese brilliant shards - some no more than three or four pages long - confirm Carver's place in the hall of America's great writers and suggest that, with his hero Chekhov, he was one of the world's masters of the short story
—— Times Literary SupplementRaymond Carver uses the English language like a whittler's knife, carving stark and unadorned prose-objects, paring away everything but the very core of human emotion
—— Chicago TribuneAddictive
—— Michelle Dean , GuardianA superbly artful collection
—— BBC CultureRemarkable... Marra is a gifted writer with the energy and the ambition to explore the lives of characters whose experiences and whose psyches might seem, until we read his work, so distant from our own. Reading his work is like watching the restoration — the reappearance, on the page — of those whom history has erased
—— Washington PostAudacious... brilliant... ambitious and fearless
—— New York Times Book ReviewEach story is a gem… almost unbearably moving
—— New York TimesSeamlessly narrated, with flashes of dark humour
—— International New York TimesMarra’s Russia is marked by both interconnection and darkly comic irony... the book’s brilliance and humor are laced with the somber feeling that the country is allergic to evolution... A powerful and melancholy vision of a nation with long memories and relentless turmoil
—— Kirkus