Raymond Carver - Böcker

The unparalleled short story collection by the great Raymond Carver, master of spare, powerful prose and one of the great American short story writers. This powerful collection of stories is set in the mid-West among the lonely men and women who drink, fish and play cards to ease the passing of time. In the opening story a man whose wife and children have left him, rearranges all his furniture on the lawn. And in each subsequent story sadness, pain and drudgery propel the characters towards their fate. But through the darkness, vivid colloquial narration and a razor-sharp sense of how people really communicate illuminate all the comedy and tragedy of ordinary life.‘The master craftsman of the modern American short story’ Daily Telegraph‘One of America's most original, truest voices’ Salman Rushdie'The most celebrated story collection from one of the true American masters' New York Review of Books

Raymond Carvers lovprisade novellsamling Vad vi pratar om när vi pratar om kärlek i översättning av Kerstin Gustafsson och med efterord av Hans Gunnarsson. Raymond Carver är en legend inom novellkonsten. Hans åtstramade, kyliga stil som trots ordknappheten "säger allt" har blivit en evig inspiration för efterföljande författare. Hans berättelser befolkas ofta av män och kvinnor som hamnat i skeden i livet som gjort dem fundersamma. Den sömniga slöja som vanligen omhuldar livet och kan göra människans vardag lite mekanisk, lite tomgångsputtrande, lite nonchalant och arrogant, kan av någon anledning en dag ryckas undan. När livet ställs på sin spets. När verkligheten helt tillfälligt behagar visa sig. Fullt ut. Det kan handla om mannen som håller på att sälja sitt hus och ställer ut allt möblemang på gräsmattan för att kanske få något sålt till förbipasserande. Som ett infall. Och nästa infall blir att helt obekymrat bjuda ett ungt par (som stannat till för att provsitta) på whiskey. Det kan handla om kvinnan som upptäcker att hennes man - som just kommit hem från sin årliga stora fisketur med grabbarna - inte längre har kvar sin normala känslighet. Liksom inte kontaktbar längre. Det som hände på fisketuren är alltför groteskt. Det kan handla om en tjugoårig dotter som är på semesterresa med sin pappa och plötsligt känns situationen inte tvungen eller konstlad - nämligen när han börjar berätta om hur det var när hon var nyfödd. Han var själv bara arton och hennes mamma bara sjutton och det var smällkall vinter ute på landet. Eller som Hans Gunnarsson skriver i sitt efterord: "Carvers noveller är oerhört effektiva - och tydliga, i den meningen att man minns dem. De är konturskarpa. Han har ett sparsmakat sinne för detaljer, han möblerar inte ett rum förrän han behöver en viss möbel. Omsorg, kan man också kalla det." Det är en stor glädje för Bakhåll att vi nu står som förlag för denna moderna klassiker: Carvers novellsamling Vad vi pratar om när vi pratar om kärlek. För första gången utkommer boken på svenska med samma novellurval som i den amerikanska utgåvan. Fyra av samlingens noveller ("Sökare", "Mister Coffee och mister Fixit", "Påsar" och "Efter jeansen") har aldrig översatts till svenska tidigare. Raymond Carver slog igenom på åttiotalet (för att sedan dö bara femtio år gammal 1988) med sin speciella novellstil - den lugna, livserfarna, där varje ord sitter som en smäck. Hans noveller har filmatiserats - ett exempel är filmen Shortcuts (en svit av Carvernoveller ihopvävda). Ett annat intressant exempel är filmen Birdman (som skildrar vad som händer med huvudpersonen när denne sätter upp novellen Vad vi pratar om när vi pratar om kärlek som teaterpjäs på Broadway). Filmen fick fyra Oscars 2015, bland annat för Bästa film. Raymond Carvers novellsamling Vad vi pratar om när vi pratar om kärlek i översättning av Kerstin Gustafsson och med efterord av Hans Gunnarsson ISBN 978-91-7742-581-6. Högkvalitetspapper, sydda ark, klotband (=hårda pärmar med tygrygg). 224 sidor.

The first collection of stories by the great master of the short story form, Raymond Carver. In the title story a man starts to suspect his wife has been unfaithful to him and his delicate grip on normality begins to disintegrate. In ‘Fat’ a waitress at a diner is changed by the large man she serves. In each story in this collection ordinary characters reveal themselves, sounding and feeling as real as living, breathing humans. Carver’s magnificently simple prose gives us mini worlds with great power, as full of pain, heart and feeling as real life. This, his first collection, transformed the American short story.'Carver has made himself the natural successor to his true mentor, Chekhov' Financial Times‘Carver is a master of the clear, sharp, resonant detail’ Daily Telegraph‘Carver's stories conjure up a quality of fellow feeling which gives the stories a compelling, dry-eyed poignancy, a melancholy but intensely moving authenticity’ William Boyd

Raymond Carver said it was possible 'to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language and endow these things - a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring - with immense, even startling power'. Nowhere is this alchemy more striking than in the title story of Cathedral in which a blind man guides the hand of a sighted man as together they draw the cathedral the blind man can never see. Many view this story, and indeed this collection, as a watershed in the maturing of Carver's work to a more confidently poetic style.

These seven stories were the last that Carver wrote. Among them is one of his longest, 'Errand', in which he imagines the death of Chekhov, a writer Carver hugely admired and to whose work his own was often compared. This fine story suggests that the greatest of modern short-story writers may, in the year before his untimely death, have been flexing his muscles for a longer work.

Fires is the best introduction to the full range and humanity of Carver's writing. It contains four essays, including a moving memoir od his father's working life in the saw-mills of the Pacific Northwest, a tribute to his mentor John Gardner, and the title essay about the influences on his writing life; fifty poems, many of them not collected elsewhere; and seven stories, including three from the early collection Furious Seasons.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is Carver's most famous collection of short stories and remians one of the most influential pieces of modern literature to date. But the original, unedited manuscript, Beginners – published here for the first time, was almost fifty per cent longer than the published collection. This restored version of Carver's stories reveals what was previously unsaid, filling in the narrative silences that have both inspired and mystified readers for so long. Beginners is a fascinating insight into the aesthetic of a literary great and, in the questions it raises, may just spark off one of the great cultural debates of our times.

This collection of Raymond Carver's interviews reveals him to have been perhaps the premier short-story writer of his generation, a lyric-narrative poet of singular resonance, and a staunch proponent of realistic fiction in the wake of postmodern formalism. The twenty-five conversations gathered here, several available in English for the first time, include craft interviews, biographical portraits, self-analyses, and wide-ranging reflections on the current literary scene.Carver discusses his changing views of his widely influential fiction collections What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981), Cathedral (1983), and Where I'm Calling From (1988). Carver explains how at the height of his fame as a fiction writer he turned to poetry, producing three prize-winning books in as many years. Finally, in the closing months of his life, he talks about the coming of his last triumphant stories, the ones that secured his reputation.

Shortly before he died, America's laureate of the dispossessed made his own selection from his short stories, revised the texts and published them in this authorative edition.The stories in Where I'm Calling From are selected from the full range of the author's work including Furious Seasons, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, What We Talk about When We Talk about Love, and Cathedral and include all seven stories from his last collection, Elephant.

'I look at all of Carver's work as just one story, for his stories are all occurences, all about things that just happen to people and cause their lives to take a turn... In formulating the mosaic of the film Short Cuts, which is based on these nine stories and a poem, 'Lemonade', I've tried to do the same thing- to give the audience one look... But it all began here. I was a reader turning these pages. Trying on these lives' - Robert Altman in his introduction.

Raymond Carver, who became a master-storyteller of his generation and was hailed in Europe as 'the American Chekhov', wrote of himself: "I began as a poet. My first publication was a poem. So I suppose on my tombstone I'd be very pleased if they put 'Poet and short-story writer - and occasional essayist', in that order." This complete edition allows readers to experience the range and overwhelming power of Carver's poetry for the first time. It brings together in the order of their American publication the poems of Fires (1985), Where Water Comes Together with Other Water (1986), Ultramarine (1988), A New Path to the Waterfall (1989) and No Heroics, Please (1991). For readers who know Carver's middle period only through his selected poems, In a Marine Light (1988), it includes the windfall of 51 poems not previously published in Britain. All of Us is edited by Professor William L. Stull of the University of Hartford, and introduced with an essay on Raymond Carver's methods of composition by his widow, the poet Tess Gallagher.