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What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: Stories Paperback – June 18, 1989

by Raymond Carver (Author)

190 customer reviews

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In his second collection, including the iconic and much-referenced title story featured in the Academy Award-winning film Birdman, Carver establishes his reputation as one of the most celebrated short-story writers in American literature—a haunting meditation on love, loss, and companionship, and finding one’s way through the dark.

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Editorial Reviews

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"What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" is not only the most well-known short story title of the latter part of the 20th century; it has come to stand for an entire aesthetic, the bare-bones prose style for which Raymond Carver became famous. Perhaps, it could be argued, too famous, at least for his fiction's own good. Like those of Hemingway or any other writer similarly loved, imitated, parodied, and reviled, these stories can sometimes produce the sense of reading pastiche. "A man without hands came to the door to sell me a photograph of my house." "That morning she pours Teacher's over my belly and licks it off. That afternoon she tries to jump out the window." "My friend Mel McGinnis was talking. Mel is a cardiologist, and sometimes that gives him the right." What other writer ever produced first sentences like these? They are like doors into Carverworld, where everyone speaks in simple declarative phrases, no one ever stops at one beer, and failure or violence are the true outcomes of the American dream.

Yet these stories bear careful re-reading, like any truly important and enduring work. For one thing, Carver is one of the few writers who can make desperation--cutting your ex-wife's telephone cord in the middle of a conversation, standing on your own roof chunking rocks while a man with no hands takes your picture--deeply funny. Then there is the sheer craft that went into their creation. Despite their seeming simplicity, his tales are as artfully constructed as poems--and like poems, the best of them can make your breath catch in your throat. In the title piece, for instance, after the gin has been drunk, after the stories have been told, after the tensions in the room have come to the surface and subsided again, there comes a moment of strange lightness and peace: "I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone's heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark."

Much of what happens in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981) happens offstage, and we're left with tragedy's props: booze, instant coffee, furniture from a failed marriage, cigarettes smoked in the middle of the night. This is not merely a matter of technique. Carver leaves out a great deal, but that's only a measure of his characters' vulnerability, the nerve endings his stories lay bare. To say anything more, one feels, would simply hurt too much. --Mary Park

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"Carver's fiction is so spare in manner that it takes a time before one realizes how completely a whole culture and a whole moral condition is represented by even the most seemingly slight sketch. This second volume of stories is clearly the work of a full-grown master." —Frank Kermode

"Raymond Carver's America is...clouded by pain and the loss of dreams, but it is not as fragile as it looks. It is a place of survivors and a place of stories.... [Carver] has done what many of the most gifted writers fail to do: He has invented a country of his own, like no other except that very world, as Wordsworth said, which is the world to all of us." —Michael Wood, front page, The New York Times Book Review

"Splendid.... The collection as a whole, unlike most, begins to grow and resonate in a wonderful cumulative effect." —Tim O'Brien, Chicago Tribune Book World

"Carver not only enchants, he convinces." —J.D. Reed, Time

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Product details

Paperback: 176 pages
Publisher: Vintage; Reissue edition (June 18, 1989)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0679723056
ISBN-13: 978-0679723059
Product Dimensions: 5.1 x 0.5 x 8 inches
Shipping Weight: 5.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 190 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #15,179 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #133 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Short Stories & Anthologies > Anthologies
- #275 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Short Stories & Anthologies > Short Stories
- #700 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Contemporary

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Gene

It will make you happy to be human.

November 29, 2013

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

While the entire book is worth reading, it is like Socrates once said, "The entire book is not worth it's best sentence," which is also true of every other book and our lives as well, when compared to a book. However, one of my favorite quotes of all time comes form this book and, in my opinion, makes the book worth buying all by itself:
“I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone's heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark.”

This is one of the books that I love for the simple fact that it illustrates the human condition so well and makes one glad to be human.

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Amrit Chima

Fierce, Quick Hits of Meaning

September 17, 2013

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Reading Carver always makes me feel like I need to clear my head before diving in, release all expectation, just go with the quick succession of fired lines without searching for beauty in the writing. Then, at the end, taking in those last sentences, I get that one quick, fierce hit of meaning, like a smack in the face. Carver's characters carry around so much pent-up frustration but have no place to put it, and the reality of their lives is so stark and awful that they sort of stand back in amazement--or in some cases do something awful. Although I prefer novels to short stories because of the time I get to sink into the story, just being able to stay with it for a while, I can't deny that Carver achieves in 3 to 10 pages what novelists generally take 300+ pages to do. He's pretty amazing.

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Denver Dilettante

The Great Raymond Carver (not that I write like he does)

September 19, 2014

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Well, Jeez, what can you say about Raymond Carver that has not been said before? He was a master of the ordinary. His subjects were regular people. They don't all live in trailer parks, despite Carver's rep. But we can relate to all of them. I'm sure he's been compared to Hemingway ad infinitum, but he does something more expressive with his material, especially insofar as he relates his stories to (his) current culture (which hasn't changed that much from ours).

Read all of his stories. You won't regret it.

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D Brookes

"What We Talk About When We Talk About Love"

December 25, 2013

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

I read this years ago and again this year. I was disappointed in a couple of the stories, but still very much impressed with several of the best. The others are "pretty good". This makes it a fairly average collection, I'm disappointed to say, but an average collection by a great author is still better than most.

The best of the stories here are some of the best short stories you'll ever read, particularly the first in the collection and the title piece.

If you want a lesson in short story writing, here's a good start.

7.5 / 10

David Brookes
Author of 'Half Discovered Wings'

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Don Woods

Nobody is a better writer than Carver.

August 21, 2017

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

bleak and moving short stories by a master writer. They can break your heart and the people in the stories are clueless. Carver doesn't judge them, he just lets them talk. They make you shake your head in empathy and disdain simultaneously.

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March 1, 2018

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Don't buy this book, buy "Beginners" instead. Read Raymond Carver's stories before they were butchered by his editor.

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March 2, 2013

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

I love short stories but had never read Carver before. I too thought "what's so great about this" after the first two. By the end of the book I had to go back and reread the first ones. Getting into the mindset of something subliminal took time. Other reviews are correct, there are no heroics. This is not a celebrity read. The feelings are quieter, personal and seem to evoke small universal truths that give pause for the simple fact that they point out the simple facts of life in a very interesting way.

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Amazon Customer

Obscure...strangly interesting. Very well written.

November 16, 2017

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Obscure...strangly interesting. Very well written. If you like short stories that will make you think a little deeper, read this book.

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Most recent customer reviews

“I could hear my heart beating”

Stories have a certain depth that’s hard to find in much literature anymore. While some stories are far better than others, this book has quickly become a favorite

Published 14 days ago

Adrianna- Chicago

Not worth your money!

Read a few of the stories and returned it as soon as I could! Super dull.

Published 23 days ago

Kindle Customer

Good read

Not what I expected. Great read but I think I hyped it up prior to knowing batting about the book.

Published 2 months ago

Patrick A Henry

I couldn't put it down

Each story opened your mind. Each story punched you in the gut. I've never been so hooked. Three more words

Published 2 months ago

Bruce Wyshak

Classic minimalist author. Powerful imagery that makes the reader ...

Classic minimalist author. Powerful imagery that makes the reader pause and think.

Published 3 months ago

mike

Masterwork of subtext and subtlety

Outstanding. A heart-wrenching and haunting work. Raymond Carver captures the ennui and hopelessness of middle class middle america life with aplomb.Read more

Published 5 months ago

Victoria

A Celebration . ..

Raymond Carver celebrates ordinary men and women in his stories , with an uncommon ability to condense universal themes into an intimate moment .

Published 5 months ago

Amazon Customer

Five Stars

This book is amazing!!

Published 7 months ago

Dia

Five Stars

good

Published 8 months ago

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