<DIV>Raymond Carver?s spare dramas of loneliness, despair, and troubled relationships breathed new life into the American short story of the 1970s and ?80s. In collections such as <I>Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?</I> and <I>What We Talk About When We Talk About Love</I>, Carver wrote with unflinching exactness about men and women enduring lives on the knife-edge of poverty and other deprivations. Beneath his pared-down surfaces run disturbing, violent undercurrents. Suggestive rather than explicit, and seeming all the more powerful for what is left unsaid, Carver?s stories were held up as exemplars of a new school in American fiction known as minimalism or ?dirty realism,? a movement whose wide influence continues to this day. Carver?s stories were brilliant in their detachment and use of the oblique, ambiguous gesture, yet there were signs of a different sort of sensibility at work. In books such as <I>Cathedral</I> and the later tales included in the collected stories volume <I>Where I?m Calling From</I>, Carver revealed himself to be a more expansive writer than in the earlier published books, displaying Chekhovian sympathies toward his characters and relying less on elliptical effects.<BR><BR> In gathering all of Carver?s stories, including early sketches and posthumously discovered works, The Library of America?s <I>Collected Stories</I> provides a comprehensive overview of Carver?s career as we have come to know it: the promise of <I>Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?</I> and the breakthrough of <I>What We Talk About</I>, on through the departures taken in Cathedral and the pathos of the late stories. But it also prompts a fresh consideration of Carver by presenting Beginners, an edition of the manuscript of <I>What We Talk About When We Talk About Love</I> that Carver submitted to Gordon Lish, his editor and a crucial influence on his development. Lish?s editing was so extensive that at one point Carver wrote him an anguished letter asking him not to publish the book; now, for the first time, readers can read both the manuscript and published versions of the collection that established Carver as a major American writer. Offering a fascinating window into the complex, fraught relation between writer and editor, Beginners expands our sense of Carver and is essential reading for anyone who cares about his achievement.<BR><BR></DIV>