Written by Raymond Carver
Read by Colleen Delany

Raymond Carver’s spare dramas of loneliness, despair, and troubled relationships
breathed new life into the American short story of the 1970s and ’80s.
In collections such as Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? and What We
Talk About When We Talk About Love, Carver wrote with unflinching exactness
about men and women enduring lives on the knife-edge of poverty and
other deprivations. Beneath his pared-down surfaces run disturbing,
violent undercurrents. Suggestive rather than explicit, and seeming
all the more powerful for what is left unsaid, Carver’s stories were
held up as exemplars of a new school in American fiction known as minimalism
or “dirty realism,” a movement whose wide influence continues to this
day. Carver’s stories were brilliant in their detachment and use of
the oblique, ambiguous gesture, yet there were signs of a different
sort of sensibility at work. In books such as Cathedral and the later
tales included in the collected stories volume Where I’m Calling From,
Carver revealed himself to be a more expansive writer than in the earlier
published books, displaying Chekhovian sympathies toward his characters
and relying less on elliptical effects.