Word: carvers
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...RAYMOND Carver's Where I'm Calling From is a masterly collection. It brings together in one volume stories that span Raymond Carver's writing career, from the early volume Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? to his more recent work, which has appeared regularly in magazines like Granta and The New Yorker in the past few years. The collection provides an opportunity to survey the influences on Carver and his development...
...Carver's particular turf is alcoholism and betrayal, in the way that Flannery O'Connor's turf was Catholicism and adult children, or in the way that Ernest Hemingway's was masculinity and killing. Frequently, alcoholism and betrayal work together in Carver's stories--couples sink into drinking binges as they despair over their broken marriages, or alcoholism itself is the grounds for a split...
...Raymond Carver writes about marriage, about domesticity, about the wear and tear of daily intimacy, especially when his characters are drunk. And his stories are zingers. The titles set the mood of emotional frazzle: they are often either provoking shards of dialogue (Put Yourself in My Shoes, They're Not Your Husband) or freighted single words (Fever, Fat, Careful). Most of these tales are culled from four previous books, with seven new entries. Of the latter, Elephant is a grimly funny catalog of woe from the soft touch in a remorseless family that lives on loans. None...
Down-home, of course, is a locale that can be found anywhere in the world. Patience Gray, a well-known food writer in England, tells us, "In the last 20 years I have shared the fortunes of a stone carver . . . Marble determined where, how and among whom we lived; always in primitive conditions." Thus did they feast and fast in Tuscany, Catalonia, the Cyclades and Apulia. Honey from a Weed (Harper & Row; 374 pages; $25) is a rich and idiosyncratic ramble through those festivals and harvests, and it makes perhaps the most enticing book of the year. There are detailed...
...lyric reflection that is perfectly plainspoken and impossible to shake: "The house is haunted and the ride gets rough/ And you've got to learn to live with what you can't rise above/ If you want to ride on down in through this tunnel of love." Raymond Carver, take a turn around the floor with Chuck Berry...