Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

by Raymond Carver

With this, his first collection, Carver breathed new life into the short story. In the pared-down style that has since become his hallmark, Carver showed how humour and tragedy dwell in the hearts of ordinary people, and won a readership that grew with every subsequent brilliant collection of stories, poems and essays that appeared in the last eleven years of his life.

• ISBN10: 0099530341
• ISBN13: 9780099530343
• Publish Date: 5 November 2009 (first published 1 January 1976)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: Vintage Publishing
• Imprint: Vintage Classics
• Format: Paperback (B-Format (198x129 mm))
• Pages: 192
• Language: English

Reviews

[jamiereadthis]

Carver’s writing is superb. This is an indisputable classic. These stories are cloaked in failure and sadness, though, and this first time through, that’s the only reason I couldn’t love each one of them proportionate to their worth.

The ones I did love in proportion, the ones that really hustle and move:
- The high as a kite “What’s In Alaska?”
- Al and Suzy and Betty and Mary and Alex in “Jerry and Molly and Sam”
- The restless “Student’s Wife”
- “The Ducks” and the millworker and the millworker’s wife
- “Bicycles, Muscles, Cigarets.” In all its truth and untruth, and its fathers and sons, and the holy hell of this line: Now he recalled his father’s one fistfight as if it were all there was to the man.