Call If You Need Me
  • Published: 1 December 2010
  • ISBN: 9781409040514
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 320

Call If You Need Me

Formats & editions
EBook
1 Dec 2010
Paperback
1 Aug 2002
Buy from…
Amazon Apple Books Google Play Kobo Booktopia eBooks.com

'Carver's technique was masterful and deft; but it is the characters - heroes in their way - of his tales that make them great and lasting works' - The Times

When he died in August 1988, Raymond Carver had just published what were thought to be his last stories in the collection entitled Elephant and his own collection of stories, Where I'm Calling from. Five previously unpublished stories have recently been discovered, and this new volume brings together all of his uncollected fiction, including a fragment of an unfinished novel, five early stories, and all of his non-fiction prose.

Three of these late-found stories are fine examples of Carver's late, open style, while two date from his middle period. The non-fiction prose includes all of his essays, together with occasional commentary on his own fiction and poetry, writings on the American short story, and reviews of work by his contemporaries, among them Donald Barthelme, Richard Brautigan, Jim Harrison, Thomas McGuane and Richard Ford. Also included is Carver's latest essay \"Friendship\", about a London reunion with Richard Ford and Tobias Wolff.

Call If You Need Me takes us into Carver's workshop, and alongside All of Us: The Collected Poems and Where I'm Calling from: The Selected Stories completes the picture of one of the most original writers in the English language of his generation.
  • Published: 1 December 2010
  • ISBN: 9781409040514
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 320
Categories:

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
Raymond Carver: Collected Stories (LOA #195)
Beginners
Fires
All Of Us
Short Cuts
Elephant
See all

Praise for Call If You Need Me

Carver the writer is still the hero of this story, as this 'last of the last' abundantly proves

Bharart Tandon, Times Literary Supplement

In Call If You Need Me, generosity and fidelity to his characters shine from every page... In his style, Carver may have affinities with Hemingway, but his portrayal of relationships between men and women is deeper and more nuanced than anything the old bullfighter ever committed to print

Toby Mundy, New Statesman

Raymond Carver has done what many of the most gifted writers fail to do, he has invented a country of his own

Michael Wood, New York Times

The prose is a prayer book of simple words, unsentimental. Carver's gleam

Tom Adair, Scotsman
penguin pop image
penguin pop image