Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?
  • Published: 1 December 2009
  • ISBN: 9780099530343
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $19.99

Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

Formats & editions
Paperback
1 Dec 2009
EBook
28 Jan 2016
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'The American Chekhov' Sunday Times

With this, his first collection, Carver breathed new life into the short story. In the pared-down style that has since become his hallmark, Carver showed how humour and tragedy dwell in the hearts of ordinary people, and won a readership that grew with every subsequent brilliant collection of stories, poems and essays that appeared in the last eleven years of his life.
  • Published: 1 December 2009
  • ISBN: 9780099530343
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 192
  • 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

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

Praise for Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

Carver is the king of short fiction. His writing hits you in the pit of your stomach, and haunts you with its disenchantment. It's almost visceral.

Natasha Lunn, Red

Carver has made himself the natural successor to his true mentor, Chekhov

Financial Times

He is alert to the unique, inconspicuous incident, when a life or a marriage may change course decisively

Sunday Telegraph

There is nobody else like him. In some ways his pared-down style is an extreme development of the Hemingway style, but Carver writes about women and the ways men relate to them far more convincingly than Hemingway ever did

Frank Kermode

Carver's stories celebrate some lasting aspects of the human condition, however minimal, conjuring up a quality of fellow feeling which gives the stories a compelling, dry-eyed poignancy, a melancholy but intensely moving authenticity

William Boyd, Daily Telegraph

Carver is a master of the clear, sharp, resonant detail

Daily Telegraph
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