Raymond Carver?s spare dramas of loneliness, despair, and troubled relationships breathed new life into the American short story of the 1970s and ?80s. In collections such as Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Carver wrote with unflinching exactness about men and women enduring lives on the knife-edge of poverty and other deprivations. Beneath his pared-down surfaces run disturbing, violent undercurrents. Suggestive rather than explicit, and seeming all the more powerful for what is left unsaid, Carver?s stories were held up as exemplars of a new school in American fiction known as minimalism or ?dirty realism,? a movement whose wide influence continues to this day. Carver?s stories were brilliant in their detachment and use of the oblique, ambiguous gesture, yet there were signs of a different sort of sensibility at work.
