No Heroics, Please: Uncollected Writings (Vintage Contemporaries Original) - Softcover

Raymond Carver

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0679740074 ISBN 13: 9780679740070

Publisher: Vintage Contemporaries, 1992

Synopsis

This volume of previously uncollected work represents the final legacy of one of the great and truly American writers of our time. It includes five of Raymond Carver's early stories (including the first one he ever published), a fragment of an unpublished novel, poems that have previously appeared only in small-press editions, and all of his uncollected nonfiction. Included here as well is Carver's last essay, "Friendship" about a London reunion with Richard Ford and Tobias Wolff. Arranged chronologically, this book affords an intimate and comprehensive thirty-year vision of a great writer in the process of becoming himself.

About this title

From the Back Cover

"A writer of astonishing compassion and honesty."

-- Washington Post Book World"With painful, funny acuteness, Carver captures the electric currents that shoot through people's lives and singe them indelibly." -- Newsweek

"Raymond Carver's America is a place of survivors and a place of stories. He has done what many of the most gifted writers fail to do: He has invented a country of his own, like no other except that very world, as Wordsworth said, which is the world to all of us." -- The New York Times Book Review

"Carver not only enchants, he convinces." -- Time

From the Inside Flap

of previously uncollected work represents the final legacy of one of the great and truly American writers of our time. It includes five of Raymond Carver's early stories (including the first one he ever published), a fragment of an unpublished novel, poems that have previously appeared only in small-press editions, and all of his uncollected nonfiction. Included here as well is Carver's last essay, "Friendship" about a London reunion with Richard Ford and Tobias Wolff. Arranged chronologically, this book affords an intimate and comprehensive thirty-year vision of a great writer in the process of becoming himself.

Reviews

This ragtag collection features juvenilia (four short stories written during Carver's undergraduate years and a fifth composed shortly afterward), poetry from the author's small press books, the fragment of a novel, essays and other miscellany. The early fiction holds virtually no literary merit; the poetry is often either derivative or superficial ("He knew he was / in trouble when, / in the middle / of the poem, / he found himself / reaching / for his thesaurus / and then / Webster's / in that order"). The book reviews (with the exception of a thoughtful review of the Selected Letters of Sherwood Anderson ) seem dated. A commencement address, delivered shortly before Carver died in 1988, has a wistfully solemn quality that will seem odd to readers of Carver's elegant but audacious short fiction. In the introduction to Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories reprinted here, Carver remarks on the importance to him of the process of rewriting: "I think by nature I'm more deliberate and careful than I am spontaneous . . . ." This collection of mostly unpolished odds and ends does a disservice to a master craftsman.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Vintage Contemporaries
• Publication date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0679740074
• ISBN 13: 9780679740070
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 239
• Editor: William L. Stull