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“... RC: When I came to the writing of these poems I hadn’t written any for about two years. I’d been writing stories, and I didn’t know if I’d ever write any more poems. I felt writing poetry might have passed out of my life. I lamented that, but it didn’t seem as if there was anything I could consciously do about it. Then I went from Syracuse, New York out to Washington State, with the intention of writing fiction ...”

“... Raymond Carver is a typically American hero, a kind of literary Rocky – janitor, delivery man, sawmill operator, servicestation attendant, an uneducated alcoholic no-hoper who rises to Major Writer status and the Professorship of English at Syracuse University. Most writers would give a right arm for such authentic redneck credentials and one can be sure that most funky jobs listed on blurbs were only held for a couple of weeks during summer vacations ...”

“... and although there are fourteen or fifteen stories here (based on extrapolated from ten stories by Raymond Carver – the handouts and the introduction solemnly say nine stories and a poem, but the so-called poem is also a prose narrative), they are intricately stitched together, like a miniaturised Comédie humaine set in Los Angeles. A doctor in a story ...”

“... Raymond Carver, acclaimed shot-story writer and poet, died on 2 August. A painstaking craftsman, he wrote most often about working-class Americans whose lives are, or have been, on the verge of collapse. Broken marriages, alcoholism, poverty, and acute, debilitating anxiety – these things rule the daily existence of his characters ...”

“... Raymond Carver was much taken with the idea that every writer creates a distinctive world: ‘Every great or even very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications … It is his world and no other.’ The idea is hardly original but one sees why he liked it. Carver’s world is something like a room in which the television is always on, unless you happen to be subjecting the neighbours to home movies ...”

“... are good prose. But when a prose voice enters poetry, it can clear and freshen the air. Beside Raymond Carver’s posthumous collection, the others I have been reading seem musty, costumed, made-up. Anyone who finds his poems flat or prosaic might consider Edward Thomas’s defence of Robert Frost: ‘if his work were printed [as prose] it would have ...”

“... street. She wonders what the book group would make of Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus, or Raymond Carver, or Richard Yates’s reissued Revolutionary Road, a whole novel about a married couple arguing. What about Alice Munro? Could she attract them, truthful, small-scale and brilliant as she is? Or would they not have it, the clear reflection of ...”

“... and traditional signs of ‘roots’ is of a piece with the fact that he was a fan of the work of Raymond Carver, and became his Japanese translator. South of the Border is a minimalist’s novel. A 1984 interview with Carver is commemorated in a Carver poem: We sipped tea, politely ...”

“... to favour a breathing period that is either long or short. Chekhov, Borges, Flannery O’Connor, Raymond Carver were short-story writers. Dostoevsky, Faulkner and (horrified as he would be to find himself with this lot) Vladimir Nabokov were novelists. If your destiny lies in one form, the other is seldom hospitable. O’Connor’s short fiction was the ...”

“... Less known here than in the US, where she’s gathered up all sorts of prizes for stories that Raymond Carver described as ‘unlike any in our literature’, Jayne Anne Phillips has always written this way. Her writing territory, though recognisably American (she appeared in the 1983 issue of Granta that introduced a new kind of writing from the US ...”

“... looking for resemblances to more familiar contemporary American fiction might well seize on Raymond Carver. At the most superficial level, the titles of their books have a similar, poker-faced off-handedness which counterpoints the gravity and bleakness of their subject-matter. Carver: Will You please Be ...”

“... an undistinguished career at Concrete High in Concrete, Washington, smack in the heart of Raymond Carver country). On the penultimate page of the book, he enlists in the Army, eager to embrace ‘the clear life of uniforms and ranks and weapons. It seemed to me when I got there that this was where I had been going all along, and where I might ...”

“... the element of fantasy, much resemblance: McEwan has much more assurance and resource, and so has Raymond Carver, a writer virtually unknown in this country who superficially resembles Carey but is – up to now, at any rate – working at quite a different level. All the same, Exotic Pleasures is an accomplished book. So, for that matter, is Bliss, for ...”

“... end of the second page – as is the case in so many American short stories – the long shadow of Raymond Carver has fallen unmistakably over the narrative. The narrator describes his unusual line of work and various grotesque experiences from his past in an apparently straightforward style. For example, he was once in a car crash caused by a deer on the ...”

“... Thomas Wolfe through Nabokov and John Barth, Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates, all the way to Raymond Carver), nor those of traditional aesthetics and literary criticism, which raise issues of value and try to define true art as this rather than that. The dialectical problems come in the reversals of class coding I have already mentioned. Whatever we ...”