Raymond Carver

Twelve short stories that open the minimalist compression of Carver's earlier work into something wider and more generous. A blind man visits a narrator who resents his presence; a woman whose husband has died asks to be taken to the ocean; a couple moves into a new house and finds their marriage reconfigured by distance. Carver at his most humane and his most hopeful.

Seventeen minimalist short stories of working-class American life: waitresses, mechanics, salesmen, the recently divorced and the chronically unemployed. Carver's people drink too much, talk around what they mean, and find that love and damage are often the same thing. The landmark collection that defined American minimalism and influenced a generation of writers.