Cathedral
  • Published: 1 December 2009
  • ISBN: 9780099530336
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $19.99

Cathedral

Formats & editions
Paperback
1 Dec 2009
EBook
28 Jan 2016
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'All the stories in Cathedral are different; some funny, some hauntingly sad. Each has its own individual and curious power' Daily Telegraph

Raymond Carver said it was possible 'to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language and endow these things - a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring - with immense, even startling power'. Nowhere is this alchemy more striking than in the title story of Cathedral in which a blind man guides the hand of a sighted man as together they draw the cathedral the blind man can never see. Many view this story, and indeed this collection, as a watershed in the maturing of Carver's work to a more confidently poetic style.
  • Published: 1 December 2009
  • ISBN: 9780099530336
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $19.99
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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

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

Praise for Cathedral

The twelve stories collected in his book Cathedral are remarkable for the originality of vision which he manages to convey in scrupulously simple prose. Carver's is a considerable and an enterprising talent

Guardian

Cathedral ought to establish his reputation as one of the most original new voices in fiction to appear from the United States for many years

Bill Buford, Times Literary Supplement

Carver is a writer of astonishing compassion and honesty, utterly free of pretence and affection, his eye set only on describing and revealing the world as he sees it. His eye is so clear, it almost breaks your heart

Washington Post

An important book in a unique career

New York Review of Books
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