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One of America's most original, truest voices' Salman Rushdie

About the Author

Raymond Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, in 1938. His father was a saw-mill worker and his mother was a waitress and clerk. He married early and for years writing had to come second to earning a living for his young family. Despite, small-press publication, it was not until Will You Please Be Quiet Please? appeared in 1976 that his work began to reach a wider audience. This was the year in which he gave up alcohol, which had contributed to the collapse of his marriage. In 1977 he met the writer Tess Gallagher, with whom he shared the last eleven years of his life. During this prolific period he wrote three collections of stories, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Cathedral and Elephant. Fires, a collection of essays, poems and stories, appeared in 1985, followed by three further collections of poetry. In 1988 he completed the poetry collection A New Path to the Waterfall.

Reviews

The master craftsman of the modern American short story
*Daily Telegraph*

One of America's most original, truest voices

One of the most celebrated American short-story writers of the 20th century
*New York Times*

A remarkable collection
*New York Review of Books*

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

Raymond Carver's stories can now be counted amongst the masterpieces of American fiction
*New York Times*

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
*Times Literary Supplement*

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
*Chicago Tribune*