Cathedral

Raymond Carver said it was possible ''to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language and endow these things - a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman''s earring - with immense, even startling power''. Nowhere is this alchemy more striking than in the title story of Cathedral in which a blind man guides the hand of a sighted man as together they draw the cathedral the blind man can never see. Many view this story, and indeed this collection, as a watershed in the maturing of Carver''s work to a more confidently poetic style.>

About the author

Raymond Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, in 1938. His first short stories appeared in Esquire during Gordon Lish's tenure as fiction editor in the 1970s. Carver's work began to reach a wider audience with the 1976 publication of Will You Please be Quiet, Please, but it was not until the 1981 publication of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love under Gordon Lish, then at Knopf, that he began to achieve real literary fame. This collection was edited by more than 40 per cent before publication, and Carver dedicated it to his fellow writer and future wife, Tess Gallagher, with the promise that he would one day republish his stories at full length. He went on to write two more collections of stories, Cathedral and Elephant, which moved away from the earlier minimalist style into a new expansiveness, as well as several collections of poetry. He died in 1988, aged fifty.

Product details

• Authors: Raymond Carver
• Publisher: Vintage UK
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 05.11.2009
• EAN: 9780099530336
• ISBN: 978-0-09-953033-6
• No. of pages: 224
• Dimensions: 129 mm x 198 mm x 14 mm
• Series: Vintage Classics; Vintage Classics
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature; FICTION / General, FICTION / Short Stories (single author), Short Stories, Modern and contemporary fiction, Fiction: general and literary, Modern and contemporary Fiction (post 1945), Modern and contemporary fiction: general and literary, Classic fiction: general and literary