Showing posts with label Raymond Carver. Show all posts

Thursday, June 19, 2025

Gordon Lish / Famous for all the wrong reasons

Gordon Lish

Gordon Lish: famous for all the wrong reasons

This article is more than 11 years old

This great man of American letters should be judged by his body of work and the success of his students, not by his editing of Raymond Carver

David Winters

Thursday 29 August 2013

Now approaching his 80th year, the writer, teacher and editor Gordon Lish has dedicated his life to redefining the frontiers of American fiction. It's no overstatement to say that Lish is to the second half of the 20th century what Gertrude Stein was to the first. Mention Lish to most readers, though, and they'll react in one of two ways: if not with a flummoxed "Who?" then worse, with an "Oh … do you mean the guy who chopped Raymond Carver?"

Raymond Carver / Little Things

Little Things

By RAYMOND CARVER

Early that day the weather turned and the snow was melting into dirty water. Streaks of it ran down from the little shoulder-high window that faced the backyard. Cars slushed by on the street outside, where it was getting dark. But it was getting dark on the inside too.

He was in the bedroom pushing clothes into a suitcase when she came to the door.

I'm glad you're leaving! I'm glad you're leaving! she said. Do you hear?

He kept on putting his things into the suitcase.

Son of a bitch! I'm so glad you're leaving! She began to cry. You can't even look me in the face, can you?

Then she noticed the baby's picture on the bed and picked it up.

He looked at her and she wiped her eyes and stared at him before turning and going back to the living room.

Bring that back, he said.

Just get your things and get out, she said.

He did not answer. He fastened the suitcase, put on his coat, looked around the bedroom before turning off the light. Then he went out to the living room.

She stood in the doorway of the little kitchen, holding the baby.

I want the baby, he said.

Are you crazy?

No, but I want the baby. I'll get someone to come by for his things.

You're not touching this baby, she said.

The baby had begun to cry and she uncovered the blanket from around his head.

Oh, oh, she said, looking at the baby.

He moved toward her.

For God's sake! she said. She took a step back into the kitchen.

I want the baby.

Get out of here!

She turned and tried to hold the baby over in a corner behind the stove.

But he came up. He reached across the stove and tightened his hands on the baby.

Let go of him, he said.

Get away, get away! she cried.

The baby was red-faced and screaming. In the scuffle they knocked down a flowerpot that hung behind the stove.

He crowded her into the wall then, trying to break her grip. He held on to the baby and pushed with all his weight.

Let go of him, he said.

Don't, she said. You're hurting the baby, she said.

I'm not hurting the baby, he said.

The kitchen window gave no light. In the near-dark he worked on her fisted fingers with one hand and with the other hand he gripped the screaming baby up under an arm near the shoulder.

She felt her fingers being forced open. She felt the baby going from her.

No! she screamed just as her hands came loose.

She would have it, this baby. She grabbed for the baby's other arm. She caught the baby around the wrist and leaned back.

But he would not let go. He felt the baby slipping out of his hands and he pulled back very hard.

In this manner, the issue was decided.

“Little Things” is a short story by Raymond Carver. It was first published in his collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love under the name “Popular Mechanics.” It was then published in 1988 in Carver’s collection Where I’m Calling From.

Tuesday, January 10, 2023

Grant Snider / The Three Rays

THE THREE RAYS

By Grant Snider

FEB. 28, 2014

Grant Snider, an illustrator and cartoonist, draws the weekly online strip “Incidental Comics.”

THE NEW YORK TIMES

Sunday, August 8, 2021

The 10 best short story collections

Elizabeth Day chooses the sharpest and smartest of small but perfectly formed works of fiction

Top 10 contemporary short stories

Elizabeth Day
Fri 17 Oct 2014 12.00 BST

Photograph: Neil Bennett

This Isn’t the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You

Jon McGregor (2012)

The best short stories should haunt you for days and weeks. The stories in McGregor’s collection have stayed with me for months on end. They are linked by a unity of place – the fenlands of Norfolk and Cambridge – and by precise, elegant prose that elevates everyday occurrences into small, perfectly rendered pieces of art. As Maggie O’Farrell put it in her Guardian review: “The stories wrap themselves around the wholly disconcerting premise that catastrophes can rear up in anyone’s life without warning.”

Photograph: Sophie Bassouls/Sygma/Corbis

Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

Raymond Carver (1976)

Possibly the most economical short story writer in this list, Carver, with his precise, punchy prose, conveys in a few words what many novelists take several pages to elucidate. In stories such as “Fat” and “Are You a Doctor?” he writes with flat understatement about suburban disenchantment in mid-century America. The collection – shortlisted for the National Book prize – was written during what Carver called his “first life”, when he almost died of alcoholism. His “second life” started in 1977, when he gave up drinking with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Photograph: Tim Knox

Tenth of December

George Saunders (2013)

Winner of last year’s inaugural Folio prize for fiction, Saunders is, according to Entertainment Weekly, “the master of joy bombs: little explosions of grin-stimulating genius that he buries throughout his deeply thoughtful, endlessly entertaining flights of imagination”. Stories such as “Victory Lap” demonstrate his deftness of touch in mixing humour and humanity, as well as showcasing his technical brilliance, incorporating several different points of view in a contained space. And “Sticks”, little over a page in length, is one of the most moving stories I’ve ever read

The Thing Around Your Neck

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2009)

Adichie had written two novels set in her native Nigeria before this collection. It shifts her gaze to the US in 12 stories that explore the experiences of husbands and wives, parents and children, immigrants and permanent residents. The title story delves into the loneliness suffered by a Nigerian girl who moves to an America far removed from her imaginings. A wise and emotive writer, in this collection Adichie touches on her familiar themes of exile, cultural miscommunications and the human desire to reconcile internal and external worlds.

Photograph: Canadian Press/Rex

Runaway

Alice Munro (2004)

The Canadian writer won the Nobel prize for literature in 2013 for her extraordinary work as “master of the contemporary short story”. She also won the 2009 Man Booker International prize for her lifetime body of work and has been called a modern-day Chekhov. Runaway is among her best collections and displays all of Munro’s mastery: the effortless shifts in time, sometimes across decades; the ability to convey an entire life in a few pages; the exploration of complex truths in uncomplicated language.

Photograph: Topical Press Agency/Getty Images

The Garden Party and Other Stories

Katherine Mansfield (1922)

This collection was first published in 1922, a year before Mansfield’s death at the age of 34 from tuberculosis. A pioneering modernist writer, Mansfield was born and brought up in colonial New Zealand before moving to Britain, where she became friends with DH Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. The title story, one of her best-known works, is written in the modernist style, with the deceptively simple setting of a family preparing for a garden party. Against this backdrop Mansfield brilliantly interweaves meditations on class, life and death, illusion and reality.

Photograph: Richard Saker/Rex Features

Pulse

Julian Barnes (2011)

Barnes is best known as a novelist and won the Man Booker prize in 2011 for The Sense of an Ending. As a result, his short stories are rather overlooked and shouldn’t be. Pulse is Barnes’s 17th book and is a masterclass in the shorter form. He is brilliant at evoking social nuance and has an unfailing eye for the tiniest detail that will shine light on the whole. Two particularly wonderful examples from this collection are “Complicity”, about the delicate beginnings of a love affair, and “East Wind”, about a relationship between an estate agent and a foreign waitress.

Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Observer

The Collected Stories

Lorrie Moore (2008)

This deliciously fat collection gives the reader the chance to dip in and out of one of the best observers of human behaviour. Moore is notable for her arch tone and her sharp humour. But what makes her special is the way she can shift so smoothly to gut-wrenching poignancy. She writes about terminal illness, family dynamics and infidelity with equal fluency. A particular favourite from this volume is “How to Be an Other Woman” from her first published collection, Self-Help (1985), which was composed almost entirely of stories from her master’s thesis.

Interpreter of Maladies

Jhumpa Lahiri (1999)

This debut collection of nine stories won the Pulitzer prize shortly after it was published in 1999 and was named the New Yorker’s debut of the year. The stories, written with what Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times described as “uncommon elegance and poise”, deal with the diversity of Indian-American immigrant experience and the curious alchemy of love and relationships. My particular favourite in this collection is “A Temporary Matter”, a beautiful mediation on grief, love and loss as a couple try to come to terms with the stillbirth of their child.

That Glimpse of Truth

David Miller (ed) (out 23 October 2014)

Some of the best short stories contain unexpected moments of felicity on which the plot pivots. And so it was that, just as I was compiling this list, I received a giant package containing this doorstep of a book. It might be the most comprehensive collection of short stories… ever, featuring an all-star cast including Angela Carter, Charles Dickens, Roald Dahl and more, selected by David Miller, a literary agent and author.

THE GUARDIAN

Two Interviews with Raymond Carver

Raymond Carver's death at fifty in 1988 cut short the career of the most influential American short story writer since Ernest Hemingway. But it did not put an end to Carver's writing--or his influence.

In the years since Carver's death a steady stream of posthumous works has appeared, thanks in large part to the efforts of his widow, the writer Tess Gallagher. These range from Carver's last-written book of poems, A New Path to the Waterfall (1989), to some of his earliest literary efforts: No Heroics Please: Uncollected Writings (1991) and Carnations: A Play in One Act (1992). The biographical volumes Carver Country (1990), . . .When We Talk About Raymond Carver (1991), and Remembering Ray (1993) have kept his memory alive, as have the television documentaries Dreams Are What You Wake Up From (1989) and To Write and Keep Kind (1992). And of course there's Short Cuts (1993), Robert Altman's irreverent Hollywood take on Carver's world.

Raymond Carver

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

Raymond Carver, who Stephen King called “surely the most influential writer of American short stories in the second half of the 20th century,” is generally regarded as having revolutionized the form. However, there are those who argue that the Carver style – what King says many critics “miscategorize as ‘minimalism’ or ‘dirty realism’ ” – is actually a product of his editor, Gordon Lish. The two had worked together successfully on Carver’s debut, the 1976 collection Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, but the relationship became strained when it came to the follow-up, a book Carver called Beginners, but which eventually appeared, in 1981, under Lish’s preferred title, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. It remains the book most general readers associate with “the Carver style.”

Raymond Carver / Coming of Age, Going to Pieces

Ernest Hemingway

Coming of Age, Going to Pieces

By RAYMOND CARVER
November 17, 1985

LONG WITH YOUTH
Hemingway, the Early Years.
By Peter Griffin.

HEMINGWAY
A Biography.
By Jeffrey Meyers.

In 1954, after surviving two plane crashes in Africa and being reported dead, Ernest Hemingway had the unique experience of being able to read his own obituaries. I was in my teens, barely old enough to have a driver's license, but I can remember seeing his picture on the front page of our evening newspaper, grinning as he held a copy of a paper with his picture and a banner headline announcing his death. I'd heard his name in my high school English class, and I had a friend who, like me, wanted to write and who managed to work Hemingway's name into just about every conversation we had. But at the time I'd never read anything the man had written. (I was busy reading Thomas B. Costain, among others.) Seeing Hemingway on the front page, reading about his exploits and accomplishments, and his recent brush with death, was heady and glamorous stuff. But there were no wars I could get to even if I'd wanted to, and Africa, not to mention Paris, Pamplona, Key West, Cuba, even New York City, seemed as far away as the moon to me. Still, I think my resolve to be a writer was strengthened by seeing Hemingway's picture on the front page. So I was indebted to him even then, if for the wrong reasons.

Raymond Carver / A brief survey of the short story

Raymond Carver
Poste by T.A.

A brief survey of the short story part five

Raymond Carver

BIOGRAPHY

With or without minimalist editing, the humanity of Raymond Carver's storytelling puts him in the same league as Chekhov

Whenever I look at Giacometti's attenuated sculptures I think of Raymond Carver's bleakly poetic early stories. Offering realism stripped to its barest essence, those that make up two of his early collections,Would You Please Be Quiet, Please? and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, conform to what John Barth called "hyperrealistic minimalism", and represent an influential return to the the blueprint of the modern short story as outlined by Chekhov.

To dispense with the lately reignited controversy pertaining to the impact of editor Gordon Lish to Carver's early style, yes, it's true to say Lish rewrote the endings to at least 10 of Carver's stories, and scrapped no less than 70% of the story Mr Coffee and Mr Fixit. The evidence is there for all to see at Indiana University, to which institution Lish sold his papers in 1991. Carver's later, post-Lish collections, Cathedral and Elephant, the latter left unfinished when he died of lung cancer in 1988, aged 50, are notably more voluble and optimistic than what came before.

But while Lish undeniably had a hand in the noteworthy style of Carver's earlier work, the editor's own fiction is a mostly indigestible blend of metafictional tricks and bathetic humour. This would seem to confirm that however skilfully he accentuated or downplayed certain elements in Carver's work, the person who imbued that work with emotion was Carver and Carver alone.

And for all the talk of minimalism and terseness, Carver's stories are full of feeling. Whether considering the early-period reticence of Why Don't You Dance? or the relative expansiveness of a later story like Cathedral, all these stories, like Chekhov's, are driven by a desire to map what it is to be human. That their construction, their seemingly arbitrary but in fact painstakingly chosen beginning and endpoints, implies both the impossibility of realising this goal and the necessity of making the attempt anyway, is what makes them beautiful, even heroic.

Carver's switch from despair to hope has long divided critics, but to characterise this split as being a chiaroscuro division of darkness and light is simplistic. Take The Bath and its expanded rewrite, A Small, Good Thing. On his birthday a boy falls into a coma after being hit by a car. As his parents fret, the baker who has prepared Scotty's uncollected birthday cake pesters them with a series of increasingly menacing phonecalls. The Bath ends with almost sadistic inconclusiveness, exploiting both the reader's urge to know whether Scotty lives or dies and his mother Ann's bewilderment. "'Is it about Scotty?'" she asks the unknown caller, assuming it's the hospital. "'It has to do with Scotty, yes.'" the voice replies. Led by the tone of the story, which implies life's cruel randomness, the reader assumes both that the voice belongs to the disgruntled baker and that Scotty will most likely die.

In A Small, Good Thing, by contrast, not only is the forged compassion between Scotty's mother and father explored, but following the boy's death the parents confront the baker, who realises the grotesqueness of his actions and apologises. The story ends with them eating fresh bread in the bakery: "They talked on into the early morning, the high, pale cast of light in the windows, and they did not think of leaving."

While vastly different in outlook and effect, to term the latter story sentimental, as it often has been, is fundamentally to misunderstand Carver's modus operandi. His stories, again like Chekhov's, are signposts as opposed to destinations, and have beginnings and endings that lie beyond the parameters of the stories themselves. While Scotty's parents experience a moment of grace that morning, there's no reason to suggest their grief has run its course. Ann's has already ebbed and flowed several times in a matter of pages, and it will no doubt continue to do so for a long time to come. Rather than a pat ending, Carver locates a moment of hope in the midst of sorrow. The later story, while less formally adventurous than its forerunner, is more emotionally daring.

Carver's work continued to develop beyond this point. The last story he ever wrote, Errand, is unique in his oeuvre, and suggests that his death cut short a fresh departure in his writing. It's somehow pleasing, though, that the final work by this writer who idolised Chekhov, and deserves comparison with him, should be both about the Russian's death and a definitive statement about the nature of storytelling. It's so neat a happenstance as to be denied inclusion in the fiction of either man.

THE GUARDIAN