What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is Carver's most famous collection of short stories and remians one of the most influential pieces of modern literature to date.
Beginners ist die ungekürzte Version von Carvers bekanntester Kurzgeschichtensammlung, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, erschienen 1981. Carver, häufig als minimalistisch bezeichnet, zeigt hier in den kleinen Tragödien des Lebens vielen Lesern unbekannte Facetten seiner Erzählkunst. Man begegnet dem jungen Mädchen, das zum ersten Mal der Gefahren des Erwachsenlebens gewahr wird. Dem Paar, das in einem Motelzimmer langsam und schmerzhaft das Ende seiner Beziehung erkennt. Dem Mann im einsamen Mittleren Westen, der seinen Platz in einer Welt ohne Focus sucht.
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is Carver's most famous collection of short stories and remians one of the most influential pieces of modern literature to date. But the original, unedited manuillegalscript, Beginners - published here for the first time, was almost fifty per cent longer than the published collection. This restored version of Carver's stories reveals what was previously unsaid, filling in the narrative silences that have both inspired and mystified readers for so long.
Beginners is a fascinating insight into the aesthetic of a literary great and, in the questions it raises, may just spark off one of the great cultural debates of our times.
Beginners is unlikely to replace
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Instead, it will be in dialogue with it, because the story has no end: there will always be afterthoughts Sarah Churchwell Guardian
Raymond Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, in 1938. His first short stories appeared in
Esquire during Gordon Lish's tenure as fiction editor in the 1970s. Carver's work began to reach a wider audience with the 1976 publication of
Will You Please be Quiet, Please, but it was not until the 1981 publication of
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love under Gordon Lish, then at Knopf, that he began to achieve real literary fame. This collection was edited by more than 40 per cent before publication, and Carver dedicated it to his fellow writer and future wife, Tess Gallagher, with the promise that he would one day republish his stories at full length. He went on to write two more collections of stories,
Cathedral and
Elephant, which moved away from the earlier minimalist style into a new expansiveness, as well as several collections of poetry. He died in 1988, aged fifty.
Über den Autor
Raymond Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, in 1938. His first short stories appeared in Esquire during Gordon Lish's tenure as fiction editor in the 1970s. Carver's work began to reach a wider audience with the 1976 publication of Will You Please be Quiet, Please, but it was not until the 1981 publication of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love under Gordon Lish, then at Knopf, that he began to achieve real literary fame. This collection was edited by more than 40 per cent before publication, and Carver dedicated it to his fellow writer and future wife, Tess Gallagher, with the promise that he would one day republish his stories at full length. He went on to write two more collections of stories, Cathedral and Elephant, which moved away from the earlier minimalist style into a new expansiveness, as well as several collections of poetry. He died in 1988, aged fifty.
Tess Gallagher (born 1943) is an acclaimed poet, essayist, author and playwright. Her honors include a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, two National Endowment for the Arts awards, and the Maxine Cushing Gray Foundation Award. She met Raymond Carver at a writers' conference in 1978, and the couple were married in 1988, six weeks prior to his death. As his will directed, she assumed the management of his literary estate. She published five Carver stories posthumously in Call If You Need Me, and successfully campaigned for the republishing of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love as Beginners, in their original and intended form.
This fascinating collection contains the original, unedited stories Raymond Carver wrote for what became - at the hands of his editor Gordon Lish - What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
