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 *

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.

Tess Gallagher (born 1943) is an acclaimed poet, essayist, author and playwright. Her honors include a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, two National Endowment for the Arts awards, and the Maxine Cushing Gray Foundation Award. She met Raymond Carver at a writers’ conference in 1978, and the couple were married in 1988, six weeks prior to his death. As his will directed, she assumed the management of his literary estate. She published five Carver stories posthumously in Call If You Need Me, and successfully campaigned for the republishing of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love as Beginners, in their original and intended form.

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