Call If You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction and Other Prose

Call If You Need Me includes all of the prose previously collected in No Heroics, Please, four essays from Fires, and those five marvelous stories that range over the period of Carver's mature writing and give his devoted readers a final glimpse of the great writer at work. The pure pleasure of Carver's writing is everywhere in his work, here no less than in those stories that have already entered the canon of modern literature.

"To a one, they demonstrate the author's characteristic bare-bones style as he placed characters of modest means and resources into the kind of ordinary crises that define ordinary lives. Gathered here, too, but taking a back seat to the stories, are all the nonfiction pieces left uncollected at the time of Carver's death. These include essays, introductions, and book reviews; and in these, his trademark pared-down prose style worked as effectively as in his short stories." Brad Hooper, Booklist

"Carver's prose, for all its simplicity, carries his mark everywhere. His tact and precision are marvelous." The New York Times Book Review

A VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES ORIGINAL

A literary event: Raymond Carver's complete uncollected fiction and nonfiction, including the recently discovered "last" stories, found a decade after Carver's death and published here in book form for the first time.

Call If You Need Me includes all of the prose previously collected in No Heroics, Please, four essays from Fires, and those five marvelous stories that range over the period of Carver's mature writing and give his devoted readers a final glimpse of the great writer at work. The pure pleasure of Carver's writing is everywhere in his work, here no less than in those stories that have alreadey entered the canon of modern literature.

Foreword by Tess Gallagher

Editor’s Preface

Kindling

What Would You Like to See?

Dreams

Vandals

Call If You Need Me

My Father’s Life

On Writing

Fires

John Gardner: The Writer as Teacher

Friendship

Meditation on a Line from Saint Teresa

Furious Seasons

The Hair

The Aficionados

Poseidon and Company

Bright Red Apples

From: The Augustine Notebooks

On “Neighbors”

On “Drinking While Driving”

On Rewriting

On the Dostoevsky Screenplay

On “Bobbet” and Other Poems

On “For Tess”

On “Errand”

On Where I’m Calling From

Steering by the Stars

All My Relations

The Unknown Chekhov

Fiction of Occurrence and Consequence

On Contemporary Fiction

On Longer Stories

Big Fish, Mythical Fish: (My Moby Dick by William Humphrey)

Barthelme’s Inhuman Comedies: (Great Days by Donald Barthelme)

Rousing Tales: (Legends of the Fall by Jim Harrison)

Bluebird Mornings, Storm Warnings: (The Van Gogh Field by William Kittredge)

A Gifted Novelist at the Top of His Game: (A Game Men Play by Vance Bourjaily)

Fiction That Throws Light on Blackness: (Hardcastle by John Yount)

Brautigan Serves Werewolf Berries and Cat Cantaloupe: (The Tokyo-Montana Express by Richard Brautigan)

McGuane Goes After Big Game: (An Outside Chance by Thomas McGuane)

Richard Ford’s Stark Vision of Loss, Healing: (The Ultimate Good Luck by Richard Ford)

A Retired Acrobat Falls under the Spell of a Teenage Girl: (Balancing Acts by Lynne Sharon Schwartz)

“Fame Is No Good, Take It from Me”: (Selected Letters by Sherwood Anderson, edited by Charles E. Modlin)

Coming of Age, Going to Pieces: (Along with Youth: Hemingway, the Early Years by Peter Griffin; and Hemingway: A Biography by Jeffrey Meyers)

Notes