Are the unedited drafts more essential because they represent the truer Carver? Or is the point the continuum of his writing, developed through the intersection of internal and external influences? That’s because, in the main, the pared-down versions of the stories are better, which opens the question of where authenticity resides.

Here, the prominence of “Beginners” adds a subtext that threatens to subvert the larger arc. The purpose of a retrospective is not so much to highlight individual stories as to trace how a writer’s aesthetic has grown. That’s either as it should be or a significant problem, depending on your perspective, but regardless, it skews the way the collection showcases Carver’s career. “Beginners” is published for the first time in “Collected Stories,” and although it comes at the end, it can’t help but function as a centerpiece. But they do without your realizing it or wanting them to.” Despite the book’s success, Carver was unhappy at how he was labeled “There’s something about ‘minimalist,’ ” he grumbled in 1983, “that smacks of smallness of vision and execution that I don’t like.” Two years ago, his widow Tess Gallagher announced plans to release the stories as her husband had conceived them, in a collection called “Beginners”: the uncut “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.”

He was right “What We Talk About” is stunningly desolate, a group of stories so laconic they almost perfectly reflect the resignation of characters struggling with alcoholism, infidelity and the desperation of diminished dreams. Knopf in the late 1970s and cut some of the stories in “What We Talk About” by more than three-quarters, paring down the language, even changing endings to highlight what he called “a peculiar bleakness.”

Not only that, but in 1995, it was revealed that his 1981 breakthrough, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” was extensively reworked by Gordon Lish, who as fiction editor of Esquire helped bring Carver’s work to a national audience. When does an act of reclamation cease to be about restoration and become about something else? That’s the question raised by “Collected Stories,” the Library of America’s new collection of the complete short fiction of Raymond Carver, who died at 50 in August 1988.Ĭomplete, of course, is a relative concept in regard to Carver, an inveterate rewriter who published many stories in different versions at various points in his career.

Raymond carver collected stories