Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories - Paperback

by Raymond Carver (Author)

From "one of the great short story writers of our time--of any time" (The Philadelphia Inquirer)--comes more than sixty stories, poems, and essays, including two early versions from the seminal collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.

"Show[s] the enormous talent of Raymond Carver beginning to take hold." --San Francisco Chronicle

A wide-ranging collection by the extravagantly versatile Raymond Carver. Two of the stories that were later significantly revised in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love appear here in their original form, revealing clearly the astounding process of Carver's literary development.

Front Jacket

You should read Fires now. These stories and poems...show the enormous talent of Raymond Carver beginning to take hold.
-- San Francisco Chronicle
"Seminal in Carver studies...A disparate collection of work bound by a unity of vision and obsession."
-- Los Angeles Herald Examiner
"Carver's most revealing book...This collection confirms the worth of Raymond Carver's work...Like bright birds in distant trees, Carver's stories appear in flashes, glimpses; Fires reveals the arc of his purposeful flight."
-- Boston Globe

Author Biography

RAYMOND CARVER was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, in 1938. His first collection of stories, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please (a National Book Award nominee in 1977), was followed by What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Cathedral (nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1984), and Where I'm Calling From in 1988, when he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died August 2, 1988, shortly after completing the poems of A New Path to the Waterfall.