Below I’ll give you my selections for the best Raymond Carver books by a few categories. I will cover these and other great books more in depth later.
- What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: Stories (1989)
- Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?: Stories (1992)
- Where I’m Calling From: Selected Stories (1989)
- Cathedral (1989)
- Short Cuts. With an introduction by Robert Altman. (1993)
- All of Us: The Collected Poems (2000)
- Call If You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction and Other Prose (2001)
- Short Cuts: Selected Stories (1993)
- A New Path to the Waterfall (1994)
- Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories (1989)
- Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life (2010)
- American Short Story Masterpieces: A Rich Selection of Recent Fiction from America’s Best Modern Writers (1989)
- Where Water Comes Together with Other Water: Poems (1986)
- Beginners: The Original Version of What We Talk about When We Talk about Love (2010)
- Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: Bookmarked (2018)
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: Stories (1989)
In his second collection, including the iconic and much-referenced title story featured in the Academy Award-winning film Birdman, Carver establishes his reputation as one of the most celebrated short-story writers in American literature—a haunting meditation on love, loss, and companionship, and finding one’s way through the dark.
Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?: Stories (1992)
With this, his first collection of stories, Raymond Carver breathed new life into the American short story. Carver shows us the humor and tragedy that dwell in the hearts of ordinary people; his stories are the classics of our time.”[Carver’s stories] can be counted among the masterpieces of American Literature.” –The New York Times Book Review”One of the great short story writers of our time–of any time.” –The Philadelhpia Inquirer”The whole collection is a knock out.
Where I’m Calling From: Selected Stories (1989)
By the time of his early death in 1988, Raymond Carver had established himself as one of the great practitioners of the American short story, a writer who had not only found his own voice but imprinted it in the imaginations of thousands of readers. Where I’m Calling From, his last collection, encompasses classic stories from Cathedral, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, and earlier…
Cathedral (1989)
Raymond Carver’s third collection of stories, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, including the canonical titular story about blindness and learning to enter the very different world of another. These twelve stories mark a turning point in Carver’s work and “overflow with the danger, excitement, mystery and possibility of life. . . . Carver is a writer of astonishing compassion and honesty. . . . his eye set only on describing and revealing the world as he sees it.
Short Cuts. With an introduction by Robert Altman. (1993)
The works of fiction – nine stories and one poem – collected in this volume form the basis for an astonishingly original film directed by Robert Altman. These now-classic stories, when read together, form a searing and indelible portrait of American innocence and loss.
All of Us: The Collected Poems (2000)
This prodigiously rich collection suggests that Raymond Carver was not only America’s finest writer of short fiction, but also one of its most large-hearted and affecting poets. Like Carver’s stories, the more than 300 poems in All of Us are marked by a keen attention to the physical world; an uncanny ability to compress vast feeling into discreet moments; a voice of conversational intimacy, and an unstinting sympathy.
Call If You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction and Other Prose (2001)
Raymond Carver’s complete uncollected fiction and nonfiction, including the five posthumously discovered “last” stories, found a decade after Carver’s death and published here in book form for the first time.
Short Cuts: Selected Stories (1993)
The nine stories and one poem collected in this volume formed the basis for the astonishingly original film “Short Cuts” directed by Robert Altman. Collected altogether in this volume, these stories form a searing and indelible portrait of American innocence and loss. From the collections Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, Where I’m Calling From, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, and A New Path to the Waterfall; including an introduction by Robert Altman.
A New Path to the Waterfall (1994)
Raymond Carver, author of Where I’m Calling From, is widely considered one of the great short story writers of our time. A New Path to the Waterfall was Carver’s last book, and shows a writer telling the truth as best as he knows how in the time left to him.
Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories (1989)
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.
Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life (2010)
When Raymond Carver died at age fifty, readers lost a distinctive voice in its prime. Carver was, the Times of London said, “the Chekhov of middle America.” His influence on a generation of writers and on the short story itself has been widely noted.
American Short Story Masterpieces: A Rich Selection of Recent Fiction from America’s Best Modern Writers (1989)
Editors Raymond Carver and Tom Jenks have selected fiction that “tells a story”–and tells it with a masterful handling of language, situation, and insight. But what is so special about this volume is that it mirrors our age, our concerns, and our lives.
Where Water Comes Together with Other Water: Poems (1986)
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).
Beginners: The Original Version of What We Talk about When We Talk about Love (2010)
“What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” is Raymond Carver’s most famous collection of short stories and remains 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.
Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: Bookmarked (2018)
A haunting meditation on love, loss, companionship, and finding one’s way through the dark, Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is one of the most important and influential short story collections in contemporary literature. In his entry in the esteemed Bookmarked series, acclaimed author Brian Evenson offers his personal and literary take on this classic Carver collection.
Best Raymond Carver Books: The Ultimate List
We highly recommend you to buy all paper or e-books in a legal way, for example, on Amazon. But sometimes it might be a need to dig deeper beyond the shiny book cover. Before making a purchase, you can visit resources like Library Genesis and download some raymond carver books mentioned below at your own risk. Once again, we do not host any illegal or copyrighted files, but simply give our visitors a choice and hope they will make a wise decision.
The Art of Editing: Raymond Carver and David Foster Wallace
Author(s): Carver, Raymond; Groenland, Tim; Wallace, David Foster
ID: 2438959, Publisher: Bloomsbury academic, Year: 2019, Size: 30 Mb, Format: pdf
Beginners
Author(s): Carver, Raymond
ID: 1421366, Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group;Vintage Books, Year: 2015, Size: 680 Kb, Format: epub
What we talk about when we talk about love and Beginners
Author(s): Carver, Raymond
ID: 1434840, Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group;Vintage Books, Year: 2015, Size: 2 Mb, Format: epub
Please note that this booklist is not final. Some books are really record-breakers according to Los Angeles Times, others are composed by unknown writers. On top of that, you can always find additional tutorials and courses on Coursera, Udemy or edX, for example. Are there any other relevant books you could recommend? Leave a comment if you have any feedback on the list.