Synopses & Reviews
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 the prose previously collected in No Heroics, Please four essays from Fires, and those five marvelous stories found recently among his papers, 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.
Review
"Carver's prose, for all its simplicity, carriers his mark everywhere....His tact and precision are marvelous." New York Times
Review
"A writer of astonishing compassion and honesty." Washington Post
Synopsis
When he died in August 1988, Raymond Carver had just published what were thought to be his last stories in the collection entitled Elephant and his own collection of stories, Where I'm Calling from. Five previously unpublished stories have recently been discovered, and this new volume brings together all of his uncollected fiction, including a fragment of an unfinished novel, five early stories, and all of his non-fiction prose.
Three of these late-found stories are fine examples of Carver's late, open style, while two date from his middle period. The non-fiction prose includes all of his essays, together with occasional commentary on his own fiction and poetry, writings on the American short story, and reviews of work by his contemporaries, among them Donald Barthelme, Richard Brautigan, Jim Harrison, Thomas McGuane and Richard Ford. Also included is Carver's latest essay "Friendship", about a London reunion with Richard Ford and Tobias Wolff.
Call If You Need Me takes us into Carver's workshop, and alongside All of Us: The Collected Poems and Where I'm Calling from: The Selected Stories completes the picture of one of the most original writers in the English language of his generation.