Beginners
  • Published: 1 December 2010
  • ISBN: 9780099540328
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $24.99

Beginners

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This fascinating collection contains the original, unedited stories Raymond Carver wrote for what became – at the hands of his editor Gordon Lilsh – What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

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 manuscript, 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.
  • Published: 1 December 2010
  • ISBN: 9780099540328
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $24.99
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About the author

Raymond Carver

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.

Also by Raymond Carver

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
Cathedral
Raymond Carver: Collected Stories (LOA #195)
Fires
All Of Us
Call If You Need Me
Elephant
See all

Praise for Beginners

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

Hopefully, thanks to Gallagher, every small, vital nuance, every moving observation, each choice of word as Carver wrote it, is there to be seen; that is why Carver cared enough to begin setting it right, and others have now finished the task

Eileen Battersby, Irish Times

An extraordinary book, more generous and rambling in tone than its distilled counterpart

Tim Adams, Observer

The most interesting book of the year

Sunday Telegraph

an extraordinary book, and probably the most influential story collection of the past 30 years

Tim Adams, Observer

a landmark book, full of surprises.

Telegraph

Lish may have helped put Carver on the map of the American short story, but the writer made himself its capital city.

Sunday Times

His style is fearsome: remorselessly spare and precise yet so sharply nuanced that the ordinary people he writes about are exposed in all their messy, emotional weakness...Pure pleasure to read on its own, it is also fascinating to compare against the Lish version.

Victoria Moore, Daily Mail

Here, for the first time, we can read the original versions. They are very good.

Michael Kerrigan, Scotsman

These vignettes remain tremendously distinctive and their characters' generally doomed attempts to keep their hope alive "in the world of men - where defeat and death are more the natural order of things" are wry and touching. Carver's landscapes of motels, "negroes" and "longhairs" are documents from another era, but they are grubby, flawed little gems that still fascinate.

James Smart, Guardian

The surprise is that despite Carver's well-earned reputation for spare, grainy prose that dipped into the hard-bitten lives of his characters, these stories have a richness of texture that complements Carver's austerity of tone. Lish seems to have flattened Carver's style, rather than sharpening it, and the tales in Beginners demonstrate just how great a writer Carver was

James Urquhart, Financial Times
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