Rating: 
Summary: My favorite book of all time!
Review: This book really changed my life and made me want to become a writer. Every story in it is good, there is no question, and most of the stories are, I dare say, great. Raymond Carver isn't for the person looking for an easy read where all will be explained. You have to look deep into the dialogue and the rare use of descriptions to find what it's all about. Carver has a knack for dialogue and these are the best examples. Don't be afraid to question the most simple line of dialogue because it's important. These stories are interesting and my favorite is definitely "Cathedral" but I love them all.
Enjoy this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Just Trying To Get Through It In One Piece...
Review: ...I am really not enjoying it...I am probably in the minority. Carver's minamalist approach just does not have the kind of eloquence and magic that grabs me. Also, so many of the stories are centered around dysfunctional families, and feature alcaholism, and couples breaking up. Carver is very redundant, both in subject matter and method. I feel like Carver used the same formula for a lot of these stories, then plugged in slighty varying charachters in slighty varying circumstances. I am finding myself asking,"How many times can Carver beat a dead horse??". In short, I find this to be tiresome. Strike that. It is maddening.
Rating:
Summary: Psychological horror at its best
Review: It's not commonly noticed (perhaps because it doesn't suit the academic approach to Carver), but many of Carver's best stories are horror stories without any of the usual trappings of horror stories. There are some excellent horror stories in here. I avoided Carver for years because I associated him with pallid New Yorker minimalism; you might see this in the work of his disciples, but not in Carver. His best stories pivot on dark insights and events that put Carver firmly in the tradition of Poe's tales of madness and Bierce's civil war stories.
Rating: 
Summary: Great stuff!
Review: Real people. Crystalline sketches of believable situations. Understated. Artful. In the Hemingway tradition. Some of these were intensely moving to me ("Cathedral"), others were eye-opening and breathtaking even though they took place in ho-hum surroundings like diners ("Fat"). Great stuff.
Rating:
Summary: The magic in simplicity
Review: The vignettes in this collection are finely crafted and poignant. There are no big words and few sentences exceeding one line, yet each story resonates in the reader like a newly discovered treasure from the past. Raymond Carver's prose can be called the new Hemingway for his lack of pretensions and the ability in encapsulating so much in so few words. He can make you cry with a story like an estranged wife helping her alcoholic husband take out a piece of earwax. Everyone should read Carver and experience the magic in simplicity.
Rating:
Summary: A great read
Review: I first became interested in Carver as an undergrad. A professor/professional writer said that he got his start in writing when he happened on a short story by Carver, which immediately sparked an insatiable quest to read everything ever written by him, subsequently inspiring in him the desire to write. Once I began reading Carver's work, I understood why. Carver has an enormous talent that, alone, makes him worth reading: he can capture the absolute reality of people, how they talk, how they think, and the brief moments of illumination that come to us all. Among his best, in my view, are "Distance," "Cathedral," and "A Small, Good Thing." I like to dabble in writing short stories myself, and some passages of his are so breathtakingly perfect in their simplicity and profundity that I memorize them. This book is a great read for anyone interested in the art of short story writing, in a realistic glimpse into different lives, or just in reading some good prose.
Rating:
Summary: Small, Good Things
Review: "It's possible," wrote Raymond Carver, "to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language . . . with immense, even startling power." All of Carver's stories are about everyday characters and events. They often, like the stories of Hemingway, end with little or no resolution. But underneath every simple story lies a strange, complex anxiety. In his early days, Carver was a hell-bound alcoholic, and his early writing reflects his way of life. "What's In Alaska?" details the unraveling of a couple's relationship. Like Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants," the story progresses through revealing and anguishing dialogue. Carver eventually managed to pull himself together and his writing became, in turn, beautiful, poetic and somewhat hopeful. His story "Cathedral" is a masterpiece; its characters, as with those in most of his stories, are trying to overcome their apathy and inarticulateness. "Cathedral" possesses a small shimmer of joy. Perhaps his best work, the story involves a husband's difficulty in accepting a blind friend of his wife's. "I wasn't enthusiastic about the visit," he states in the beginning of the story. The blind man comes to the house and spends the evening with the couple. The husband is uncomfortable with the blind man, his way of looking at things, his smell. To break the ice he offers the man some pot, and the two men smoke together. The story builds as the two talk in front of the television together and it ends with a perfect, shimmering moment. Carver managed to drop his drinking habit, but his love of smoking cut his career and his life short. His life ended just as the lives of his characters were beginning to brighten up. Carver has left us with a collection of characters that seem to be a bit out of touch, like Captain Ahab on Demerol, but which one of us is really any different? One leaves a Carver story feeling like the narrator of his story "Feathers": "I knew it was special. That evening I felt good about almost everything in my life."
Rating:
Summary: Range of Emotions Emphasize Carver's Greatness
Review: Short story compilations are usually like tv dinners. Maybe the corn is good on this tray, or the meat on the other, but how often is it all good? Ray Carver fulfills all of our microwavable dreams, giving us story after story that bangs home with a good taste. "Cathedral", a story about a blind man who has a profound sense of sight, gives us the full monty of what Carver does best -- description. "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" paints love and relationships like Beethoven writes music. From presidential candidates to what people consider kinky sex, originality is a lost cause, a lost art. Other than Carverite T.C. Boyle, recent short fiction has become banal and useless. Go back to Carver.
Rating: 
Summary: one of the greats?
Review: as a lit major, i've heard lots about raymond carver as one of the masters of the short story, but i'm afraid that I have to disagree. carver spent part of his career known as a minimalist, meaning that every word in his stories carries meaning and there are no extras in them. that makes for quick reads, but I found the stories lacking. carver seems to skip important pieces of his stories and many of them don't seem to have an ending. they just cut off. I'm not saying that carver's work is not worth reading. it is. he was an important figure in american literature, and he is not a bad writer, I just find other authors, such as cheever, hemingway, and hawthorne to be the true "masters" of american short fiction. In fact, stories such as "so much water so close to home," "where i'm calling from," "what we talk about when we talk about love," "a small good thing," and "they're not your husband" to be excellent stories, and they alone make this collection worth purchasing.
Rating:
Summary: Good, but I'm in no rush to canonize him
Review: Carver, as one reviewer put it, has been approaching something like literary sainthood in the years after his death. I enjoy his stories but, honestly, I'm not willing to put him in with the masters yet. A lot of the praise for him seems to be motivated by the sort of elitist reverse-elitism that academics like to practice - my God, he writes about working class characters in their own language! his prose is stripped down of any flashiness! how honest, how REAL! The more you read, though, the more you see that his prose style is just as much a trick as the florid, swollen sentences of metafiction. Also, what bothers me is that it's capable of producing a very narrow range of emotional effects. Many of the stories, true, do reveal many layers of complexity with additional study. But basically, Carver is only capable of one or two notes, and he hits them again and again, albeit with great effectiveness: Heartbreak. Working class desperation. After reading a few stories, you start waiting (sort of the way you wait for something really disturbing to happen in a Flannery O'Connor story) for the heartbreak to happen. And you're almost always right: at the end, there it is again. I don't really think that's the way a great story should work. The work of a master should have the ability to surprise. The ones that are acknowledged masterpieces don't follow the formula - the ending he added to A Small, Good Thing (originally, it was another heartbreak) adds the emotional complexity to the story that I don't see in a lot of his work. And the fact that he was never really able to achieve any measure of success outside the short story format maybe shows the limitations of his talent. That being said, on the territory that he chose to explore, I think he did a remarkable job. There may be richer veins in other areas of literature, but his stories are definitely worth a read.
| 
