Where I'm Calling From: Selected Stories [Paperback]

The themes covered in these stories are love, loss, marriage, betrayal, beer and fishing. He really does write the miniutae of life beautifully and finds the extraordinary in the ordinary. Some of the stories don't really have a sense of closure but they are so beautiful and haunting that it doesn't matter. One story about a boy who is knocked down by a hit and run driver actually had me in tears and I had to put it down for a while before reading on.

I would recommend this book to anyone who appreciates good writing and feels like getting lost for a while. I think I can honestly say that I have never read a better short story collection and will definitely be looking out for more of his work. These stories are really a benchmark for short story writing and hope that some of you give it a go.

Raymond Carver's short fiction is often placed in the realistic tradition of Stephen Crane and Ernest Hemingway. Also, given the often muted, anticlimactic atmosphere of the prose there is a tension which is reminiscent of either Franz Kafka or Harold Pinter.

A motif within Carver's works is the issue of love, or, more precisely, the issue of love and its absence, and the bearing of love's absence on marriage and individual identity. He depicts the quiet desperation of white-and-blue-collar workers, salesmen and waitresses, and their sense of betrayal at being unable to express themselves. Things are frequently left unspoken and conflicts unresolved, and the meaning of the story is often only revealed through implications. In particular, his portrayals of marriage problems are full of emotional tension, hidden memories, wounds, longing, hate, anxiety, and melancholy.

"It is possible to write a line of seemingly innocuous dialogue and have it send a chill along the reader's spine - the source of artistic delight, as Nabokov would have it. That's the kind of writing that most interests me." (Carver in The New York Times, February 15, 1981)

This particular collection, Where I'm Calling From, published posthumously, contains a good selection, containing stories from Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? Cathedral and all seven stories from Elephant. Though, having said that, a better introduction to his stories would probably just be a copy of Cathedral. That way you wont have to buy any repeats.