“I write a creative senior thesis, five short stories. I name it Small Fires. There’s a collection of poetry by Raymond Carver called Fires. These are smaller ones, I guess.” Rumpus contributor Eric Puchner, author of today’s essay ...

Tao Lin hast posted his reading diary, including only books he has “finished or anticipate[s] finishing.” The list includes Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life, Baby Hedgehogs and American Apparel Dog, and The Blue Octavo Notebooks. Do ...

The conventional shorthand is that Gordon Lish’s versions are bracing and bleak, Carver’s verbose and sentimental. But, in a just world, Beginners would be published as a stand-alone volume to replace the shell that Lish made of it...

On the heels of our recent look at the dynamic between Raymond Carver and Gordon Lish, a close reading of versions of Carver’s stories, with and without Lish’s editorial involvement.

This week in New York The New York Times’s Arts and Leisure Weekend features Natalie Portman, Jeff Bridges, and Jimmy Fallon, Sweetgrass opens at the Film Forum, Carol Sklenicka discusses Raymond Carver, the films of Joyce Weiland s...

Brad Gooch on Raymond Carver's messy, brutal life, groundbreaking fiction, and the controversy over his editor's influence-all detailed in Carol Sklenicka's definitive new biography. Anatole Broyard once titled a memoir of the Gre...

“To those students who showed any promise she would give copies of Nabokov, or EM Forster… Otherwise, she would give them Raymond Carver.” (Via.)

In the New York Times Sunday Book Review, Stephen King has written a review of Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life by Carol Sklenicka. King begins with a summation of Carver’s semi-amazing alcoholism and then moves on to a dissection of...

New York Times: Stephen King on Raymond Carver by Carol Sklenicka and Carver's Collected Stories: King is pro-Maryann Carver (with a fellow AAer's disdain for Carver's drunken treatment of his first wife) and acidly anti-Gordon Lish...

Carol Sklenicka’s biography and a long-overdue “Collected Stories” spotlight Carver’s growth as a writer and illuminate his poisonous relationship with the editor Gordon Lish.

This week: Andre Agassi on his memoir, "Open"; Stephen King on a new biography of the short story writer Raymond Carver; Motoko Rich with notes from the field; and Jennifer Schuessler with best-seller news.

This week: Andre Agassi on his memoir, "Open"; Stephen King on a new biography of the short story writer Raymond Carver; Motoko Rich with notes from the field; and Jennifer Schuessler with best-seller news. Sam Tanenhaus is the host...

Actually, the writer Raymond Carver never cared for the word "Minimalism" as the way to describe his taut, tight-lipped short stories. But that was the term they came to be known by in the late 1970s and '80s, when he was at the hei...

Among those American writers who were originally identified as "minimalists," a group that would include Raymond Carver, Bobbie Ann Mason, Ann Beattie, and Tobias Wolff, Mary Robison may have been the most minimalist of them all--or...

The only thing worth saying in a book review, Raymond Carver once said, is Good job, keep writing! Some people hearing that line assumed he was soft-hearted if not soft-minded – but Carver was neither. He knew that writing, espec...

Will Ferrell is set to star in a $10 million independent dramedy, Everything Must Go, based on a work by renown, late short story author Raymond Carver entitled "Why Don't You Dance." The project marks the feature debut of newcomer ...

The galleys for Carol Sklenicka’s forthcoming biography of Raymond Carver arrived yesterday. (Full disclosure: Carol and I are old friends.) After scouring the book for references to myself, I sat down to the problem that trips up a...

Per usual most of the following were on the twitter (@personanondata).Long feature article on Raymond Carver and long time editor Gordon Lish in the Observer.The pair had worked together for years – Lish, a dashing, influential lite...

Jeff Baker’s lengthy feature on Tess Gallagher, Raymond Carver’s widow, closes with a sweet detail—there’s a little mailbox at Carver’s grave, and visitors can use the pen and paper nearby to leave him a message. (”I wanted to thank...

It’s Raymond Carver night at the Rumpus! Moments after I wrote and scheduled the preceding post, I saw this tweet from the Library of America: “WSJ on Raymond Carver: ‘There must be few story collections whose notes offer more melod...