Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love has long been regarded as a modern literary classic. Forty-five years after its publication, the book has now been ranked No. 1 on Collider’s list of “6 Short Story Collections That Have Aged Like Fine Wine.”
Describing Carver’s second story collection as “the one that made him a household name,” the outlet praised the book as “a masterpiece of minimalist fiction” with its stories that “explore the elusive nature of relationships and the difficulty of articulating our wants and needs, finding extraordinary tension in the ordinary lives of working-class Americans.”
Collider noted that in his writing, Carver “trusts the readers to recognize the heartbreak lurking between the lines, the frustration in silences, the yearning behind the carefully chosen sentences, and that trust is what makes his stories so powerful.”
Carver’s 1981 book topped Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery and Other Stories and even The Complete Stories of Ernest Hemingway on Collider’s list.
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love contains 17 short stories that explore the difficulty of finding connection and meaning in ordinary life. The stories are as follows: “Why Don’t You Dance?”; “Viewfinder”; “Mr. Coffee and Mr. Fixit”; “Gazebo”; “I Could See the Smallest Things”; “Sacks”; “The Bath”; “Tell the Women We’re Going”; “After the Denim”; “So Much Water So Close to Home”; “The Third Thing That Killed My Father Off”; “A Serious Talk”; “The Calm”; “Popular Mechanics”; “Everything Stuck to Him”; “One More Thing” and “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.”
In an interview for the book Conversations With Carver, Carver described the stories in the collection as “so pared down.”
“Everything I thought I could live without I just got rid of, I cut out,” he shared.
The author added that after he submitted What We Talk About When We Talk About Love for publication, he didn’t write another thing for six to eight months.
Carver’s career was cut tragically short. He died in 1988 of lung cancer at age 50.
In 1993, the Robert Altman film Short Cuts was inspired by stories by Carver. Two of the stories used—“So Much Water So Close to Home” and “Tell the Women We’re Going” — were adaptations from What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.
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