Tag Archives: Raymond Carver

Reading About Writing

21 January 2011 · by · in Digressions, Marginalia

Near the start of the year, delivering late Christmas presents to a friend’s children, I unearthed Ben Yagoda’s The Sound on the Page, subtitled “Great Writers Talk About Style and Voice in Writing.” Everybody who writes is engaged in the remarkable enterprise of making consciousness manifest — catching the slipperiest of substance, a thought, and […]

marginalia || My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead: Great Love Stories from Chekhov to Munro, edited by Jeffrey Eugenides

3 April 2010 · by · in Marginalia

I remember saving up for My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead: Great Love Stories from Chekhov to Munro, tried the whole a-few-coins-a-day route.  I even prayed to Santa, I begged friends. I rarely buy books brand-new–I’m technically, well, poor. But then, in the middle of last year, a story of mine had won an award. As […]

marginalia || What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, by Raymond Carver

18 February 2010 · by · in Marginalia

It took forever to return to Raymond Carver. I mean, I love the man, and his writing  I don’t know the cause of my skittishness, although I have blamed it on the unease I feel when plunging into a book I know is good but whose goodness I might not be ready for. Am I […]

marginalia || Fault Lines: Stories of Divorce, ed by Caitlin Shetterley

27 October 2009 · by · in Marginalia

Sometimes you pick up a book even if you have no bleeding clue if it’ll be worth the couple of bucks you shelled out for it. I did this a lot back then, back when I had no notion of TBR-piles toppling, or taking matters into their own hands and just forming their very own […]