Praise for
RAYMOND CARVER’S
WILL YOU PLEASE BE QUIET, PLEASE?

“At once ghostly and hard-edged, surreal, yet absolutely familiar. Carver’s genius lies in his uncanny ability to take the commonplace and make you see it as if for the first time.… He writes of fearful matters … with a subtle compassion for the plight of ordinary men and women.”

—San Francisco Examiner

“Potent … Carver’s prose, for all its simplicity, carries his mark everywhere.… His tact and precision are marvelous. [His] stories have been carefully shaped, shorn of ornamentation and directed away from anything that might mislead. They are brief stories but by no means short: they imply complexities of action and motive.… Mr. Carver’s work here is done, and wonderfully.”

—Geoffrey Wolff, The New York Times Book Review

“Raymond Carver’s stories are extraordinary in their language, their music and their huge, terrifying vision of ordinary human life in this country. He is among the best authentically American writers we now have.”

—Leonard Michaels

“Raymond Carver’s vision is somber and resolute, and the cumulative effect is powerful.”

—Harper’s

“Faces, times, places, feelings, all of them ordinary, but all of them somehow important too, important … on the human scale. These are remarkable stories, an experiment in style and content. Buy the book!”

—Houston Chronicle

“Carver’s remarkable talent for short fiction proves itself in the movement of his stories from beginning to end.… His tight, laconic stories illuminate a kind of life that sophisticated fiction seldom deals with without condescension or sentimentality.”

—New York Review of Books

“Raymond Carver’s stories have tremendous force, the power of a connecting left hook when the fist is filled with a roll of coins. Such an impact cannot be shaken off. Carver is extraordinary!”

—James Dickey

“These [are] carefully crafted, extremely moving stories, strangely disquieting … but there is something heartening in the way we face this somber music, resolute and together.”

—Seattle Times

“Marvelous. Carver is extremely good. The simplicity and emotional directness of the collection will remind readers at times of John O’Hara. It is, in short, great reading.”

—Boston Globe

“A triumph … reminiscent of the best of Hemingway.… The men and women in these pages are complete and identifiable. We listen to them, we watch them, and then we know them.”

—Christian Science Monitor