What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: Stories (Vintage Contemporaries) - Softcover

"Carver's fiction is so spare in manner that it takes a time before one realizes how completely a whole culture and a whole moral condition is represented by even the most seemingly slight sketch. This second volume of stories is clearly the work of a full-grown master." --Frank Kermode

"Raymond Carver's America is...clouded by pain and the loss of dreams, but it is not as fragile as it looks. It is a place of survivors and a place of stories.... [Carver] has done what many of the most gifted writers fail to do: He has invented a country of his own, like no other except that very world, as Wordsworth said, which is the world to all of us." --Michael Wood, front page, The New York Times Book Review

"Splendid.... The collection as a whole, unlike most, begins to grow and resonate in a wonderful cumulative effect." --Tim O'Brien, Chicago Tribune Book World

"Carver not only enchants, he convinces." --J.D. Reed, Time

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.