Search Results

“... motion. This funny, ungenerous evocation of the ‘American Kafka’ is surely a version of Raymond Carver, the ‘American Chekhov’, as transmogrified by Updike’s imagination. Certainly alcohol plays a part in Carver’s work very similar to the one it does in Klegg’s. On the other hand, the real-life ...”

“... American writers who emerged in the 1970s and early 1980s, particularly Ford, Tobias Wolff and Raymond Carver. (Ford has said that Carver didn’t mind when ‘I adopted as my own’ the direct style of his short story openings.) They tended to write about ordinary, hard lives in a spare, detached way, with much ...”

“... a woman and a losing bet. He rarely strays far from the conventions of prose, having, like Raymond Carver, always written short stories in tandem with poetry, and though in his earliest writing he displays a toughened lyrical strain, he has tended increasingly to mistrust this type of response. In its stead he has evolved a terse, relentlessly ...”

“... drinking in the manner of the couples in ‘What We Talk about When We Talk about Love’, the Raymond Carver story that was famously rewritten and retitled (from ‘Beginners’) by his editor, Gordon Lish. Englander’s couples engage in a competitive discussion about ethnic authenticity, and the Anne Frank game is its didactic climax. It’s the ...”

“... of virtually every young American writer coming of age in the Eighties, is heavily influenced by Raymond Carver, but he shares none of Carver’s wonder at his creations and certainly none of his feeling for their banality. Clay makes only a cameo appearance in Ellis’s second book, The Rules of Attraction, a campus ...”

“... a drug addict in the 1970s and seemed to transcend, once and for all, the lingering influence of Raymond Carver on the form. Here was a writer who’d gone to the dark side, deep into madness, yet returned to sanity with his sense of humour intact. It appeared to many of us borderline holy that Johnson could write with such lack of swagger and self-pity ...”

“... was admired by some people because it was an adaptation, though a leaden one, of the work of Raymond Carver – who, in death, is more highly regarded than any other American writer of fiction of recent years. Prêt-à-Porter has flaws, but its strengths are considerable; I think it is Altman’s best work since Nashville (1975), which it resembles ...”

“... his tone goes against the grain of what became fashionable in American fiction, he shares with Raymond Carver and John Updike and others the feeling that homo erectus americanus, the life of any American male, its slow detail, is of intrinsic interest. His novel, when it appeared in 1991, was both praised and sneered at. His florid style and his long ...”

“... kind which Hemingway was to perfect, and which is found in contemporary short-story writers like Raymond Carver, but a kind of solid interest in what happens next after one thing has happened. A traveller in the Frozen North has one or two bits of bad luck: socks and matches getting wet, things of that sort. They produce a deadly escalation which ...”

“... that critics in Germany and his native Switzerland are talking about when they compare Stamm to Raymond Carver. Take ‘The True Pure Land’, one of his more ‘naked’ stories. The narrator, a Swiss man working in New York for six months, lives in Spanish Harlem. He sits at his window, smoking, watching a woman opposite. His roommate, a man from ...”

“... books are by American writers. ‘The Train’ is one of the shortest of the 12 stories in Raymond Carver’s Cathedral. It begins: ‘The woman was called Miss Dent, and earlier that evening she’d held a gun at a man. She’d made him get down in the dirt and plead for his life.’ We learn nothing more about Miss Dent, except that now in the ...”

“... cultural pluralism’ (Toni Morrison, Sandra Cisneros) and ‘lower-middle-class modernism’ (Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates), with Venn diagrams illustrating the overlap between these groups, and their polarisation by aesthetic sub-tendencies such as maximalism and minimalism. Despite his professed indifference to the pro-con ...”

“... brand of Science Fiction owes more to the winning cartoonism of Kurt Vonnegut (touched perhaps by Raymond Roussel’s delight in deliriously over-elaborate explanations) than to the dirty cyberpunk realism of Sterling and William Gibson. Similarly, Murakami’s fantasy narrative is more reminiscent of the elegant allegories of Ursula le Guin than the sword ...”

“... and unforced talent. The writing isn’t like anyone’s I can think of, but the names of Raymond Carver and J.D. Salinger may point us roughly in the right direction. The prose is oblique and uninsistent, the stories are seemingly inconsequential: but you find yourself laughing and wanting to go back to see why. The opening story describes a ...”

“... It isn’t hard to imagine her tacking lines from Chekhov and Isaac Babel above her desk, like Raymond Carver, or exclaiming, as Tolstoy is said to have done, of a businesslike sentence from Pushkin (‘The guests were arriving at the dacha of X’): ‘How charming! That is how one ought to write.’ Lahiri was born in London in 1967 and grew up in ...”