Raymond Carver – författare

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 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 novellsamling Katedral. Carver föddes i Oregon 1938 med arbetarklass­bakgrund. Han började skriva när han jobbade som nattvakt på sjukhus och fick sin första framgång med novellen "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please" i antologin Best American Short Stories 1967. Mest känd är han för samlingen Vad vi pratar om när vi pratar om kärlek. Han dog 1988, bara 50 år gammal efter många års duster med alkoholen. Carver är en legend inom novellkonsten. Hans åtstramade, kyliga stil som trots ordknappheten "säger allt" har blivit en evig inspiration för efterföljande författare. Berättelserna befolkas av män och kvinnor som hamnat i skeden i livet som gjort dem fundersamma. Den dunkla slöja som vanligen omsveper tillvaron och kan få oss att framleva våra dagar lite mekaniskt, lite nonchalant och arrogant, kan av någon anledning ryckas undan. När livet ställs på sin spets. När verkligheten helt plötsligt behagar visa sig, fullt ut och utan skygglappar. Carvers texter är effektiva. Och tydliga. 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 han skildrar är det påtagliga. Vanliga människors liv i vardagen. Det är fråga om vinddrivna existenser, män och kvinnor i ett Amerika som Gud glömde. Allt i kristallklara scener som på ett fascinerande vis uppenbarar det meningsfulla i tillvaron. Det meningsfulla i det lilla. Det är en stor glädje för Bakhåll att få stå som förlag för denna moderna klassiker, Raymond Carvers berömda novellsamling Katedral. För första gången utkommer boken på svenska med samma novellurval som i den amerikanska utgåvan. Översättningen är av Kerstin Gustafsson, efterordet om Carvers liv, verk och betydelse är av Oline Stig. Tre av samlingens noveller ("Tåget", "Kupén" och "Betslet") har aldrig översatts till svenska tidigare. Raymond Carvers novellsamling Katedral i översättning av Kerstin Gustafsson, efterord Oline Stig. ISBN 978-91-7742-598-4. Högkvalitetspapper, sydda ark, klotband (=hårda pärmar med tygrygg). 240 sidor.

In collections such as Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Raymond Carver wrote with unflinching exactness about men and women enduring lives on the knife-edge of poverty and other deprivations. Beneath his pared-down surfaces run disturbing, violent undercurrents. Suggestive rather than explicit, and seeming all the more powerful for what is left unsaid, Carver's stories were held up as exemplars of a new school in American fiction known as minimalism or "dirty realism," a movement whose wide influence continues to this day. Carver's stories were brilliant in their detachment and use of the oblique, ambiguous gesture, yet there were signs of a different sort of sensibility at work. In books such as Cathedral and the later tales included in the collected stories volume Where I'm Calling From, Carver revealed himself to be a more expansive writer than in the earlier published books, displaying Chekhovian sympathies toward his characters and relying less on elliptical effects. In gathering all of Carver's stories, including early sketches and posthumously discovered works, The Library of America's Collected Stories provides a comprehensive overview of Carver's career as we have come to know it: the promise of Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? and the breakthrough of What We Talk About, on through the departures taken in Cathedral and the pathos of the late stories. But it also prompts a fresh consideration of Carver by presenting Beginners, an edition of the manuscript of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love that Carver submitted to Gordon Lish, his editor and a crucial influence on his development. Lish's editing was so extensive that at one point Carver wrote him an anguished letter asking him not to publish the book; now, for the first time, readers can read both the manuscript and published versions of the collection that established Carver as a major American writer. Offering a fascinating window into the complex, fraught relation between writer and editor, Beginners expands our sense of Carver and is essential reading for anyone who cares about his achievement.LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

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

'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 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.

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.

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.

One of Raymond Carver’s final collections of poetry, moving from the beauty of the natural world to thoughts of mortality and family and art. Throughout, Carver “has the astonished, chastened voice of a person who has survived a wreck, as surprised that he had a life before it as that he has one afterward, willing to remember both sides” (The New York Times Book Review).From the Trade Paperback edition.

Winner of Poetry Magazine’s Levinson Prize, an illuminating collection from the middle of his career, Raymond Carver’s poems “function as distilled, heightened versions of his stories, offering us fugitive glimpses of ordinary lives on the edge” (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times).

From the Trade Paperback edition.

More than sixty stories, poems, and essays are included in this wide-ranging collection by the extravagantly versatile Raymond Carver. Two of the stories—later revised for What We Talk About When We Talk About Love—are particularly notable in that between the first and the final versions, we see clearly the astounding process of Carver’s literary development.From the Trade Paperback edition.

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.

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