The master craftsman of the modern American short story

One of America's most original, truest voices

One of the most celebrated American short-story writers of the 20th century

A remarkable collection

I remember being floored by the first Raymond Carver collection I read: What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

Raymond Carver's stories can now be counted amongst the masterpieces of American fiction

These 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

Raymond 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

Addictive

A superbly artful collection

Remarkable... 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

Audacious... brilliant... ambitious and fearless

Each story is a gem… almost unbearably moving

Seamlessly narrated, with flashes of dark humour

Marra’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