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What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: Stories | 
| Author: Raymond Carver
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: $12.95
Buy Used: $4.95
You Save: $8.00 (62%)
New (32) Used (35) Collectible (6) from $4.95
Avg. Customer Rating:  36 reviews
Sales Rank: 18213
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 176
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.1 x 0.7
ISBN: 0679723056
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780679723059
ASIN: 0679723056
Publication Date: June 18, 1989
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Condition: Thanks for choosing the Atlanta Book Company!
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com
"What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" is not only the most well-known short story title of the latter part of the 20th century; it has come to stand for an entire aesthetic, the bare-bones prose style for which Raymond Carver became famous. Perhaps, it could be argued, too famous, at least for his fiction's own good. Like those of Hemingway or any other writer similarly loved, imitated, parodied, and reviled, these stories can sometimes produce the sense of reading pastiche. "A man without hands came to the door to sell me a photograph of my house." "That morning she pours Teacher's over my belly and licks it off. That afternoon she tries to jump out the window." "My friend Mel McGinnis was talking. Mel is a cardiologist, and sometimes that gives him the right." What other writer ever produced first sentences like these? They are like doors into Carverworld, where everyone speaks in simple declarative phrases, no one ever stops at one beer, and failure or violence are the true outcomes of the American dream. Yet these stories bear careful re-reading, like any truly important and enduring work. For one thing, Carver is one of the few writers who can make desperation--cutting your ex-wife's telephone cord in the middle of a conversation, standing on your own roof chunking rocks while a man with no hands takes your picture--deeply funny. Then there is the sheer craft that went into their creation. Despite their seeming simplicity, his tales are as artfully constructed as poems--and like poems, the best of them can make your breath catch in your throat. In the title piece, for instance, after the gin has been drunk, after the stories have been told, after the tensions in the room have come to the surface and subsided again, there comes a moment of strange lightness and peace: "I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone's heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark." Much of what happens in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981) happens offstage, and we're left with tragedy's props: booze, instant coffee, furniture from a failed marriage, cigarettes smoked in the middle of the night. This is not merely a matter of technique. Carver leaves out a great deal, but that's only a measure of his characters' vulnerability, the nerve endings his stories lay bare. To say anything more, one feels, would simply hurt too much. --Mary Park
Product Description
In his second collection of stories, as in his first, Carver's characters are peripheral people--people without education, insight or prospects, people too unimaginative to even give up. Carver celebrates these men and women.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 31 more reviews...
 Beautiful and Melancholic April 22, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The stoic, bare prose of Raymond Carver's short fiction bears the stamp of a true craftsman, as well as an artist who knows the meaning of pain. These stories are a remarkable aesthetic accomplishment, one of the best collections of the period; they are both simple and intriguing in their cool and stark economy of form. Like Hemingway, Carver had the gift of creating a world through brief and beautiful glimpses. Never does he insert any clunky ideology or literary affectations. These stories are elegant, clean, and self-contained. They will also break your heart.
 A thematic experiment that scaffolds Cathedral July 20, 2007
The title story of this collection is Carver at his best: Human husks take the place of characters, and they are filled with copious amounts of alcohol. They inhabit a sparse and deliberate setting. And no great Carver story would be complete without inebriated reflections on the human condition. Other bright flashes in this collection include the pseudo-horror story "Tell the Women We're Going" and the oft-anthologized "Gazebo."
But too many of the stories in this collection feel incomplete. They are missing that narrative "click," that satisfying sound you hear at the end of a good story when a psychological latch locks something special in your head. Stories like "Mr. Coffee and Mr. Fixit," "A Serious Talk," "The Bath," and "One More Thing" seem to stop rather than end. Carver must have recognized this himself, because he re-writes "The Bath" as "A Small, Good Thing" for his follow-up collection, Cathedral, which is far superior to What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.
This collection seems to have been assembled around the title story. The thematic commitment necessarily binds the stories, but also perhaps weakens the overall craft. The stories either tip-toe around or splash through the theme, darkening it or twisting it here and there, and then when the theme is used up, too many of the stories stop telling themselves. In the title story, this works well, by the majority of this collection falls flat.
Carver is still experimenting in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, and I give him credit for bravely submitting his attempts to tell stories in a new way. He hits his stride with the title story and perhaps with "Gazebo," but it isn't until his collection Cathedral that Carver gets control of his craft.
A Walk on the Dark Side We Should All Take July 3, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Reading this collection of short stories was like taking a walk on the dark side of human nature, made all the more scary and powerful by Carver's masterful, minimalist style. He hones right in on the essence of the character's lives and spares the reader any gratuitous drama. The result is a feeling of undeniable bleakness. Yet, similar to Hemmingway's style, the strong characters find their strength in a certain type of resignation.
What I liked most about this book is how I found myself clearly wanting to distance myself from the bleakness of these character's lives, yet, I was maddeningly unable to. That's the beauty of Carver's minimalist style; he hones the truth down to its barest form, so that a reader can't avoid finding a sliver of it within. And that's the true scare-factor of this book; Carver demonstrates beautifully the fine line all of our lives traverse, and how we must be vigilant, aware, and beware in every moment.
good book March 31, 2007
0 out of 5 found this review helpful
Got the book as promised in a timely manner. The book is good needed it for a class that I was behind in and was able to catch up the same day it came in.
 Wonderful Carver March 25, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Carver's texts are pure American, and in their purity his characters and stories become a universal experience. His language, strong, concise and to the point is charged with emotion. He uses only the necessary words to describe and each word is there for a purpose.
This is my second book by Carver. I started with Fires and I'm anxiouslly awaiting the arrival of recently purchased Cathedrals.
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