Product Description

These seven stories were the last that Carver wrote. Among them is one of his longest, 'Errand', in which he imagines the death of Chekhov, a writer Carver hugely admired and to whose work his own was often compared. This fine story suggests that the greatest of modern short-story writers may, in the year before his untimely death, have been flexing his muscles for a longer work.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #393936 in Books
• Published on: 2003-09-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 128 pages

Review
'Elephant is superb and suggests how much he still had to give' Ian McEwan

About the Author
Raymond Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, in 1938. His father was a saw-mill worker and his mother was a waitress and clerk. He married early and for years writing had to come second to earning a living for his young family. Despite, small-press publication, it was not until Will You Please Be Quiet Please? appeared in 1976 that his work began to reach a wider audience. This was the year in which he gave up alcohol, which had contributed to the collapse of his marriage. In 1977 he met the writer Tess Gallagher, with whom he shared the last eleven years of his life. During this prolific period he wrote three collections of stories, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Cathedral and Elephant. Fires, a collection of essays, poems and stories, appeared in 1985, followed by three further collections of poetry. In 1988 he completed the poetry collection A New Path to the Waterfall.

Customer Reviews

Very Good Carver Collection
If you haven't read Raymond Carver before, this is probably the wrong book with which you should start. His stories "Cathedral", "Nobody Said Anything", and "Where I'm Calling From" (to name just a few of my favorites) represent his best work; the stories contained in "Elephant" do not. Although "Intimacy" and "Blackbird Pie" are two very strong stories in "Elephant", I would reach back further if you truly want to enjoy Carver at his best. This book is really only worth the money if you are a Carver completist looking to own everything he put into print.

Carver is no Chekhov.
What I can't understand is not the revered tedium of Raymond Carver, but how Robert Altman managed to use this sterile material to create one of the great, rich tragicomic masterpieces of the last twenty years. The closing story here, about the death of Chekhov, is an attempt to extend his range, but the flat biographical style, the phoney insertions of 'meaningful' details and 'significant' events, the clumsy gropings for understated emotion, are quite intolerable.