Raymond Carver Popular Books
Raymond Carver Biography & Facts
Raymond Clevie Carver Jr. (May 25, 1938 – August 2, 1988) was an American short story writer and poet. He published his first collection of stories, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, in 1976. His breakout collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981), received immediate acclaim and established Carver as an important figure in the literary world. It was followed by Cathedral (1983), which Carver considered his watershed and is widely regarded as his masterpiece. The definitive collection of his stories, Where I'm Calling From, was published shortly before his death in 1988. In their 1989 nomination of Carver for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the jury concluded, "The revival in recent years of the short story is attributable in great measure to Carver's mastery of the form." Early life Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, a mill town on the Columbia River, and grew up in Yakima, Washington, the son of Ella Beatrice Carter (née Casey) and Clevie Raymond Carver. His father, a sawmill worker from Arkansas, was a fisherman and a heavy drinker. Carver's mother worked on and off as a waitress and a retail clerk. His brother, James Franklin Carver, was born in 1943. Carver was educated at local schools in Yakima. In his spare time, he read mostly novels by Mickey Spillane or publications such as Sports Afield and Outdoor Life, and hunted and fished with friends and family. After graduating from Yakima High School in 1956, Carver worked with his father at a sawmill in California. In June 1957, at age 19, he married 16-year-old Maryann Burk, who had just graduated from a private Episcopal school for girls. Their daughter, Christine La Rae, was born in December 1957. Their second child, a boy named Vance Lindsay, was born a year later. Carver worked as a delivery man, janitor, library assistant, and sawmill laborer, while Maryann worked as an administrative assistant, high school English teacher, salesperson, and waitress. Writing career Carver moved to Paradise, California, with his family in 1958 to be close to his mother-in-law. He became interested in writing while attending Chico State College and enrolled in a creative writing course taught by the novelist John Gardner, then a recent doctoral graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, who became a mentor and had a major influence on Carver's life and career. In 1961, Carver's first published story, "The Furious Seasons", appeared. More florid than his later work, the story strongly bore the influence of William Faulkner. "Furious Seasons" was later used as a title for a collection of stories published by Capra Press, and is part of the collection, No Heroics, Please and Call If You Need Me.Carver continued his studies under the short story writer Richard Cortez Day (like Gardner, a recent PhD alumnus of the Iowa program) beginning in autumn 1960 at Humboldt State College in Arcata. He chose not to take the foreign language courses required by the English program and received a B.A. in general studies in 1963. During this period he was first published and served as editor for Toyon, the college's literary magazine, in which he published several of his own pieces under his own name as well as the pseudonym John Vale.With his B-minus average, exacerbated by his penchant to forsake coursework for literary endeavors, ballasted by a sterling recommendation from Day, Carver was accepted into the Iowa Writers' Workshop on a $1,000 fellowship for the 1963–1964 academic year. Homesick for California and unable to fully adjust to the program's upper middle class milieu, he only completed 12 credits out of the 30 required for a M.A. degree or 60 for the M.F.A. degree. Although program director Paul Engle awarded him a fellowship for a second year of study after Maryann Carver personally interceded and compared her husband's plight to Tennessee Williams' deleterious experience in the program three decades earlier, Carver decided to leave the University of Iowa at the end of the semester. According to biographer Carol Sklenicka, Carver falsely claimed to have received an M.F.A. from Iowa in 1966 on later curricula vitae. Maryann, who postponed completing her education to support her husband's educational and literary endeavors, eventually graduated from San Jose State College in 1970 and taught English at Los Altos High School until 1977. After completing graduate work at Stanford, she briefly enrolled in the University of California, Santa Barbara's English doctoral program when Carver taught at the institution as a visiting lecturer in 1974.In the mid-1960s, Carver and his family resided in Sacramento, where he briefly worked at a bookstore before taking a position as a night custodian at Mercy Hospital. He did all of the janitorial work in the first hour and then wrote through the rest of his shift. He audited classes at what was then Sacramento State College, including workshops with poet Dennis Schmitz. Carver and Schmitz soon became friends, and Carver wrote and published his first book of poems, Near Klamath, under Schmitz's guidance.1967 was a landmark year for Carver with the appearance of "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?" in Martha Foley's annual Best American Short Stories anthology and the impending publication of Near Klamath by the English Club of Sacramento State College. He briefly enrolled in the library science graduate program at the University of Iowa that summer but returned to California following the death of his father. Shortly thereafter, the Carvers relocated to Palo Alto, California, so he could take his first white-collar job, at Science Research Associates, a subsidiary of IBM in nearby Menlo Park, California, where he worked intermittently as a textbook editor and public relations director through 1970.Following a 1968 sojourn to Israel, the Carvers relocated to San Jose, California; as Maryann finished her undergraduate degree, he continued his graduate studies in library science at San Jose State through the end of 1969 before failing once again to take a degree. During this period, he established vital literary connections with Gordon Lish, who worked across the street from Carver as director of linguistic research at Behavioral Research Laboratories, and the poet/publisher George Hitchcock.After the publication of "Neighbors" in the June 1971 issue of Esquire at the instigation of Lish (by now ensconced as the magazine's fiction editor), Carver began to teach at the University of California, Santa Cruz at the behest of provost James B. Hall, an Iowa alumnus and early mentor to Ken Kesey at the University of Oregon, commuting from his new home in Sunnyvale, California. Having endured a succession of failed applications to the Stegner Fellowship, Carver was admitted to the prestigious non-degree Stanford University graduate creative writing program for the 1972–1973 term, where he cultivated friendships with Kesey-era luminaries Ed McClanahan and Gurney Norman in addition to contempor.... Discover the Raymond Carver popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Raymond Carver books.
Best Seller Raymond Carver Books of 2024
-
Murder Trials
CiceroCicero's speeches "In Defence of Sextus Roscius of Amerina," "In Defence of Aulus Cluentius Habitus," "In Defence of Gaius Rabirius," "Note on the Speeches in Defence of Caelius an...
-
The End of the Novel of Love
Vivian GornickA finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, Vivian Gornick's The End of the Novel of Love explores the meaning of love and marriage as literary themes in t...
-
Beginners
Raymond CarverFrom “one of the great short story writers of our timeof any time” (The Philadelphia Inquirer)comes the original manuscript of the seminal 1981 collection, What We Talk About When ...
-
What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank
Nathan EnglanderThese eight new stories from the celebrated novelist and shortstory writer Nathan Englander display a gifted young author grappling with the great questions of modern life, with a ...
-
Lee a Raymond Carver y otros poemas
Carlos TrujillosLee a Raymond Carver y otros poemas. 3: Cuando el poeta toma un libro de poemas/ Busca leerse a sí mismo/ Quiere verse a sí mismo en ese nuevo espejo/ Cree que son sus poemas/ Los ...
-
Object Lessons
The Paris ReviewA New York Magazine Best Book of the YearA Huffington Post Best Book of the Year Twenty contemporary authors introduce twenty sterling examples of the short story from the pages o...
-
What It Used to Be Like
Maryann Burk CarverMaryann Burk Carver met Raymond Carver in 1955, when she was fifteen years old and he was seventeen. In What It Used to Be Like, she recounts a tale of love at first sight in which...
-
The Penguin Book of Modern African Poetry
Gerald Moore'Poetry, always foremost of the arts in traditional Africa, has continued to compete for primacy against the newer forms of prose fiction and theatre drama.' This wonderfully compr...
-
Technique and Sensibility in the Fiction and Poetry of Raymond Carver
Arthur F. BetheaA comprehensive examination of the fiction and poetry of Raymond Carver.
-
Cathedral
Raymond CarverPULITZER PRIZE FINALIST Twelve short stories that mark a turning point in the work of “one of the true American masters" (The New York Review of Books).“A writer of astonishing co...
-
Welcome Thieves
Sean BeaudoinBlack humor mixed with pathos is the hallmark of the twelve stories in this adult debut collection from a master writer of comic and inventive YA novels. A young man spends a whol...
-
Ultramarine
Raymond Carver"Carver's gifts as a storyteller shine through his poetry" (Los Angeles Times) in this collection that moves from the beauty of the world to thoughts of mortality and family and ar...
-
Slow Jogging
Hiroaki Tanaka & Magdalena JackowskaRunning is America’s most popular participatory sport, yet more than half of those who identify as runners get injured every year. Falling prey to injuries from overtraining, fault...
-
Big Bad Love
Larry Brown"Larry Brown writes like a force of nature."Pat Conroy Larry Brown caught the rapt attention of readers and critics with the 1988 publication of Facing the Music, his prizewinning ...
-
The Paris Review Book
The Paris ReviewAn exciting new anthology from the journal Time magazine called "the biggest 'little magazine' in history." To commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the venerable Paris Review, ...
-
The Mainstream Companion to Scottish Literature
Trevor RoyleThe Mainstream Companion to Scottish Literature is the most comprehensive reference guide to Scotland's literature, covering a period from the earliest times to the early 1990s. It...
-
The Foxes Come at Night
Cees Nooteboom & Ina RilkeSet in the cities and islands of the Mediterranean, and linked thematically, the eight stories in The Foxes Come At Night read more like a novel, a meditation on memory, life and d...
-
Call If You Need Me
Raymond CarverThe complete uncollected fiction and nonfiction, including the five posthumously discovered “last” stories, published here in book form for the first timefrom “one of the great sho...
-
Handing One Another Along
Robert Coles, Trevor Hall & Vicki KennedyIn this book on shaping a meaningful and ethical life, the renowned, Pulitzer Prize–winning author explores how character, courage, and human and moral understanding can be fostere...
-
Best New Horror
Stephen JonesBest New Horror combines dozens of the best and grisliest short stories of today. For twentyfive years this series has been published in the United Kingdom as The Mammoth Book of B...
-
All of Us
Raymond CarverA rich collection of poems from not only “one of the great short story writers of our time” (The Philadelphia Inquirer), but one of America’s most largehearted and affecting poets....
-
The Poetry of Raymond Carver
Sandra Lee KleppeBest known as one of the great short story writers of the twentieth century, Raymond Carver also published several volumes of poetry and considered himself as much a poet as a fict...
-
The Heaven of Animals
David James PoissantNamed one of Amazon’s Best Short Story Collections of 2014 One of Atlanta Journal Constitution’s 9 Best Books of 2014 Best Short Story Collection of the Year, Tweed's Magazine Winn...
-
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
Raymond CarverThe most celebrated story collection from “one of the true American masters” (The New York Review of Books)a haunting meditation on love, loss, and companionship, and finding one’s...
-
Hurricanes in Perfect Power
Various Artists & Candice BrathwaiteA stunning new collection of short stories about motherhood, selected and introduced by Candice Brathwaite.'To describe my mother would be to write about a hurricane in its perfect...
-
Short Cuts
Raymond Carver & Robert AltmanFrom “one of the great short story writers of our time” (The Philadelphia Inquirer)nine stories and a poem that offer a searing portrait of American innocence and lossand formed th...
-
El fumador y otros relatos
Marcelo LilloUna inolvidable colección de relatos sobre la cara agridulce de la vida.En su primer libro, el autor chileno Marcelo Lillo ofrece doce relatos marcados por un tono de desgarro y ex...
-
Village Voices
Odile HellierA celebration of the legacy of the Village Voice bookshop in Paris, founded by Odile Hellier in 1982a hub of social life and a refuge for artists, writers, and anglophone literary ...
-
The Contract
William PalmerOne day in June 1931 the body of a young girl was found on a lonely beach in Long Island, New York. She was bruised and there were some signs that she had been raped. It was though...
-
Where Water Comes Together with Other Water
Raymond CarverWinner of Poetry Magazine’s Levinson Prize An illuminating collection of poems from the middle of Carver's career that “function as distilled, heightened versions of his stories, ...
-
The Visual Poetics of Raymond Carver
Ayala AmirThe Visual Poetics of Raymond Carver draws on the study of visual arts to illuminate the short stories of noted author Raymond Carver, in the broader context of vision and visualiz...
-
Raymond Carver
Sam HalpertRaymond Carver has become a literary icon for our time. When he died in 1988 at the age of fifty, he was acclaimed as the greatest influence on the American short story since Hemin...
-
Creature di caldo sangue e nervi
Antonio SpadaroRaymond Carver è un grande scrittore. Le ragioni del suo successo vivono nello spazio di tensione di una vita, fatta di «caldo sangue e nervi», come scriveva Cechov, autore tra i p...
-
Raymond Carver
Carol SklenickaThe first biography of america’s bestknown short story writer of the late twentieth century.The London Times called Raymond Carver "the American Chekhov." The beloved, mischievous,...
-
The Carver Chronotope
G.P. LainsburyRaymond Carver's fiction is widely known for its careful documentation of lowermiddleclass North America in the 1970s and 80s. Building upon the realist understanding of Carver...