Rating: 
Summary: Simple people, simple lives, special stories
Review: There is nothing particularly special about Raymond Carver's characters. Without doubt that is what makes them so interesting. They are everyday people with everyday lives. They dislike their jobs and they fight with their wives, they drink beer and smoke cigarettes. At their core, they are a pretty accurate reflection of the average American. So what's so interesting about that? Well, nothing really. Except that Carver has the power to make these people real. And it's not through elaborate, flowery prose. None of that in these stories, thank you very much. Carver uses the minimum number of words and still creates fascinating human characters with deep emotions and complex idiosyncracies. His characters are raw and edgy. And Carver catches them at their best and at the worst. He seems to witness them when they think they are all alone and no one is watching.This is a fairly comprehensive collection of stories ranging through Carver's writing career. What impresses me most is that the stories are consistently good - even the early ones. And just when you think you have him figured out, he throws a curve ball at you, as with the last story in the collection titled "Errand." While the other 36 stories are set in present-day America and focus on anonymous characters, this one tells the final days of Russia's great playwright, Anton Chekhov, in the late 1800's. And while it is a dramatic departure from his typical style and substance, it still works remarkably well. It's almost as if he is teasing us with a glimpse of his depth and range.
Rating: 
Summary: Look deeper
Review: Raymond Carver wrote stories with extremely detailed and fascinating plots, characters, and dialogue. Yes, he was a minimalist. That does not mean that he wrote stories without a plot. Instead, Carver's plots are simple and obvious, they serve as vessels for the message Carver is packing, one that he always delivers with one hell of a wallop by the end of each of his stories. Reading each story once will not yield complete understanding for the reader. Great fiction is usually like this. Instead, rereadings will bring the true meanings, they'll show what this master of prose was trying to say. Raymond Carver never wrote a novel because he didn't have to, because he could always express what he was trying to say in about 20 pages of beautiful, elegant, simple prose, unlike Tom Wolfe, who takes 740 pages in A Man in Full to say absolutely nothing. Carver's wife and editor did not interfere with his writing, that's a common myth that was spread and kept alive by all those jealous of Carver's accomplishments. I felt the need to respond to the previous review so that possible buyers of Where I'm Calling From would not be dissuaded and give this book a shot. You will find in its pages a genius, a man who is sorely missed and for very good reason. Raymond Carver was a true master of the short story, and he shows it here.
Rating: 
Summary: Honest & Deep
Review: For anyone who loves the art of the short story. Raymond Carver may have been one of the greatest short story writers of modern American literature, and in this collection we get his best. "Cathedral" is a work of art that one gets more from with each reading. In this story we get Carver's unique take on perception. His characters are working class people with common flaws, and everyday humanity. In "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love", we spend time with two couples who discuss meaningful issues without pulling any punches, and Carver has no place for false sentimentality. "The Calm", and "Gazebo" are two others that stand out in this rich collection.
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Summary: Carver loves his characters yet he's never sentimental
Review: Raymond Carver has been compared, rightly, to Chekhov because of his ability to absorb the reader in a "small" story and say something profound about the human condition. Absent in Carver's stories are stereotypical characters. For example, in "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love," we read a story about a heart surgeon, Mel McGuiness, who is obsessed with preaching the virutes of absolute love to his wife and two friends, another couple. As we read the story, we see evidence that Mel is the embodiment of the absence of love. He is imperious, bullying, dogmatic, control-obsessed, fearful of life. Yet Carver doesn't allow us to dismiss Mel so easily. As Mel pontificates on love and gets more and more drunk, we are afforded glimpses of Mel's profound wisdom, which shows that there are two Mels, a tyrant and a vulnerable searcher of truth, that are warring against each other. Mel, the searcher of truth, knows there is a more profound, permanent love than merely carnal or erotic passion. At one point in the story, he confesses, in a moment of drunkenness, that he is completely ignorant of life. We sympathize with Mel's passion for "ultimate love," yet we are at the same time appalled at Mel's bullying and vanity. Mel's character is indicative of the kind of complexities and contradictions that Carver dramatizes in his very readable stories.
Rating:
Summary: Honest & Deep
Review: For anyone who loves the art of the short story. Raymond Carver may have been one of the greatest short story writers of modern American literature, and in this collection we get his best. "Cathedral" is a work of art that one gets more from with each reading. In this story we get Carver's unique take on perception. His characters are working class people with common flaws, and everyday humanity. In "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love", we spend time with two couples who discuss meaningful issues without pulling any punches, and Carver has no place for false sentimentality. "The Calm", and "Gazebo" are two others that stand out in this rich collection.
Rating:
Summary: May Not Be For Everyone
Review: May not be for everyone if you want the standard elements of a short story such as a character who really wants something and has to overcome a series of escalating obstacles to obtain it or fail. That's not the formula he follows. His characters and settings are stark but very realistic, the dialog is clipped and somewhat strange. I think it's some of the best short stories I've ever read. I think if you like Hemingway, you'll like Carver. But Carver is not for everyone. May not be for everyone. No.
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Summary: Raymond Carver is da man!
Review: I actually have never read this one, but I did read Cathedral, and What We Talk About... some years ago, when I was in college or just out. That's basically this compilation. They are all beautiful and touching stories- this guy is as gifted as any short story writer that would be taught in classrooms. Think of Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants". I remember giving Cathedral to a friend at U of Delaware who said he didn't like it. Why?- It's too depressing. But that's not quite true, it's real. I was and still am a "student" of contemporary
story writers, and these are very rewarding reads. There is a lot of truth in his writing. Instructional and, dare I say it, entertaining. Turn off the television and read this compilation.
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Summary: What he'd be writing now
Review: People who consider Raymond Carver to be a strictly minimalist writer should really read this book from cover to cover. What they will discover is a career on the cusp of change, just before the author's life was tragically cut short. The stories are presented in chronological order. The opening dozen stories or so are classics of minimalist style which reaches its peak with the devestating 3-page story "Little Things" in which a child is literally torn apart by its parents divorce. But Carver's tone and style changes in the stories that follow. "What We Talk About When We Talk about Love" and the gut-wrenching "So Much Water So Close To Home" take on a new level of story-telling where Carver gives us a more intimate look at his characters. The last two of the previously published stories are nothing like the earlier stories. In "Cathedral", a typical Carver married man--distant, cynical, and slightly smug--makes surprising contact with another human being, presumably for the first time, in the most unlikely of situations. It is almost a salvation. "A Good Small Thing" (which was a revision of an earlier story called "Scotty") is nothing less than a masterpiece. In Carver's earlier career, this story would have ended bitterly and, perhaps, indifferently. Instead, this story ends up with an astonishing flavor of hope, forgiveness, and even closure. The seven "New Stories" at the collection's end just drive home the fact that Carver was really moving forward or at least in a new direction. I defy anyone to read "Intimacy" or "Elephant" and say, "Typical minimalism." I would place a heavy bet that the reader would reply the same way I did, "Damn! Damn! Can you imagine what he'd be writing if he were still with us?" Damn. Rocco Dormarunno, Author of The Five Points
Rating: 
Summary: A fruitless, frustrating read.
Review: I am sorry to say that I have tried several times to read that book, recommended by an excellent writer friend of mine, and simply failed to finish it every time. My dislike of Raymond Carver(like my dislike for New York) feels to me like a shortcoming but there you have it. There are no points to Carver's stories and I find it infinitely arid and unrewarding to read short pointless stories with no aim. Lack of resolution you call it? To me, it goes against the very appeal of reading. I can't remember the stories, I can't remember the characters and I don't care. Doesn't that mean that Carver fails somewhere? Why do we read if not to be entertained, moved, to learn something, to travel to another universe? I'm a lifelong reader, but the supposed wonders of Mr. Carver fly way over my head.
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Summary: Reader from Calif needs to look up "metafiction"
Review: "Metafiction" refers to stories that refer back to the process of writing itself, or to the fact that the stories are in fact "stories" in an effort to explore the boundaries of fiction and reality. This is not, far as i can tell, an interest of Carver's. Carver was often grouped (with some argument) in a school of American writers under the title "Dirty Realism"--a focus on ordinary characters in every day experiences, in simple, conversational language (as opposed to elaborate fireworks, puns and metaphors). This unadorned text has a real poetry about it, and, to my mind, elevates its otherwise hapless protagonists, somehow or other. Perhaps that was what Calif. was thinking of. C'mon, sport, get your terms straight! Anyway, readers searching for metafiction would be advised to look elsewhere: Barth, Beckett come to mind.
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